[ Lost in the Landscape ]

succulence

One of the halls in San Diego’s Bal­boa Park almost always seems to have a plant show ded­i­cated to one group of plant or another. This past week­end it was the turn for cac­tus and suc­cu­lents, cour­tesy the San Diego Cac­tus and Suc­cu­lent Society.

This show fea­tured an expected sam­pling of cac­tus, but a sur­pris­ingly low num­ber of plants with col­or­ful, splashy foliage like you’d find on some sedums or echevarias. Maybe some of them don’t trans­port so eas­ily, and many oth­ers get too big to take to a show. Or maybe there’s a cer­tain snob­bery against easy-to-like plants that are prob­a­bly a lit­tle over­ex­posed in gar­den cen­ters and home stores around town.

I’m not sure how to react to this entry, a carved up spec­i­men of the com­mon San Diego County coastal prickly pear, Opun­tia lit­toralis. Most botan­i­cal gar­dens will have van­dal­ized cac­tus and suc­cu­lents, with ini­tials carved into plants that will carry the scars for the rest of their lives. And here’s another act of cre­ative van­dal­ism. It’s fun, but I’m a lit­tle too uptight to enjoy it with­out feel­ing some guilt or dis-ease. But in the end it’s prob­a­bly a bet­ter deal for the plant than to chop up the leaf for a big serv­ing of nopales.

What­ever the rea­son for the dearth of “pretty plants,” weird was in, and I found myself grav­i­tat­ing to the side of the exhi­bi­tion hall with plants that took up the idea of suc­cu­lent growth habits and ran with it in ways you don’t see in cac­tus or rosette-forming suc­cu­lents. Pretty many of them are not, but there’s a major cool fac­tor with these.

Out of these I really grooved on the cau­di­ci­form species, plants that develop grossly enlarged stem bases, stems or roots to store water for the plant to use dur­ing the dry months of the year.

It was easy to snap up a big pile of pho­tos at the show with my cell­phone cam­era, but the qual­ity of almost all of them was been pretty pathetic. Low indoor light = Slow expo­sures = Blurry pho­tos. And con­trol­ling focus is really really touchy to nearly impossible.

I’m not about to give up my real cam­eras, but gosh these lit­tle devices are handy, like the con­ve­nient Host­ess Twinkies of the pho­to­graphic world. Amaz­ing how much we’re will­ing to give up for the sake of con­ve­nience. Still, every now and then the pho­to­graphic Host­ess Twinkie god­dess smiled on me and gave me sharp images that were focuses almost where I’d have focused with my camera.

Any­way, you might have guessed that where there’s a plant show, there’s usu­ally a plant sale. But that’ll be the topic of a future post…

June 07 2011 | Categories: gardening | Tags: cactus • caudiciform plants • succulent shows • succulents | 9 Comments »

amusing…

…and the win­ner in the cat­e­gory of Best Use of Bar­be­cue Tongs in a Gar­den Set­ting goes to…

This sight comes from the cac­tus sec­tion of one of my local hang­outs, Wal­ter Ander­son Nurs­ery. Jenny had com­mented that some­one had told her that they weed around spiny plant by using tongs. Here’s a sim­i­lar use of tongs that makes for a less painful shop­ping experience…

May 06 2009 | Categories: gardening | Tags: cactus | 4 Comments »

first epipyllums of the season

There are gar­dens zones that I con­sider to be mainly my spaces, and there are oth­ers that I con­sider John’s. The pond/shaded patio area is largely his gar­den play­ground, and he has a num­ber of pot­ted plants, includ­ing sev­eral dif­fer­ent kinds of epi­phyl­lums, the orchid cactus.

For a cou­ple months now, we’ve been watch­ing buds develop on one of the epis. The plants aren’t labeled, and there are enough of them that you for­get which one is which. As we watched the lit­tle buds we had no idea what color the flow­ers would be. Judg­ing by the sepals on the outside–red, maybe?

Oops. It’s actu­ally a pure white inner flower when it opens. Here you can see the white petals are ringed with red-tinged, yellowish/greenish sepals.

When a plant gets sev­eral on them at a time, it would be a traffic-stopper if we had traf­fic in the back yard… For a cac­tus, epipyl­lums are on the wimpy side. Like, you have to squirt water at them every now and then. And they don’t cope well with freez­ing tem­per­a­tures. And they like mostly-shaded con­di­tions. Other than that, they’re pretty easy–and spec­tac­u­lar start­ing about now..

April 23 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: cactus • epiphyllums • orchid cactus | 6 Comments »