There are some things I just don’t get. Waffles topped with fried chicken and syrup, for one thing. Crested succulents, another.
A trip to a cactus show or nursery site for succulents will likely turn up a section devoted to plants with crested (or “cristate”) and monstrose growths. Generally I find that the shapes of plants are interesting enough, and I usually don’t go gaga over some genetic oddball.
But the oddball cresting behavior found its way to the garden anyway. This is a young Euphorbia lambii in the back yard, one of four I have growing in pots.
Here’s a closeup…
And here’s a view from the top…
The typical habit for this plant is to produce branches that are distributed around its growing tip, something that you can see in this normal lambii nearby. With the crested mutation, the apical meristem, the point where new growth emerges, has changed from a point to a line. So instead of a cylindrical stem with branches all around, you get a stem that grows flat, like a cobra’s hood, with new growths distributed along that line.
From what research I’ve done it isn’t apparent what causes this particular mutation. The genus Euphorbia, however, is one of those where you could encounter it fairly commonly. (If there’s anything in the plant’s environment that caused it, I wonder if might be drought stress. Of the four plants, this one received the least amount of water. A couple times it came close to defoliating. All the others are growing normally.)
I’ll admit that the crested growth interesting. Maybe I’ll learn to love it. But I’m not there yet…
June 22 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: crested succulents • cristation • Euphorbia lambii • mutations | 2 Comments »
This is the result of one of my weekend projects:
It’s one of four steel cubes that I assembled to put in the new raised bed. The sides of the bed are made of sheet steel that’s already weathered to a rich, warm, rusty patina, so I wanted some pots to put in it that were of the same material.
John vetoed my first avant-garde conceptual ideas for arrangements, arrangements that worked with competing systems of geometrical hierarchies, one of them based in part on some of the ideas behind Bernard Tschumi’s postmodernist and highly conceptual Parc de la Villette in Paris. But below is one that I finally came up with that makes us both happy. It has some of the geometrical tensions that I wanted to work with. At the same time, the arrangement of the elements is a little chaotic and whimsical—to the point that none of them sit flat on the ground—a quality that appealed to John.
Each pot is planted with the identical plant material. Euphorbia lambii is placed in the center, pointing as perfectly upright and away from the earth’s core as I could manage without getting out the level, an effect that I’m hoping will point out how crookedly each planter is placed. Creeping thyme will eventually protect the top of the slanted top plane of potting mix.
This is an overview of two of the other containers in the garden space, here in the middle- and background, with part of the new stepping stone pathway:
If you have basic of welding chops and a supplier that will pre-cut pieces fairly accurately, you can make them yourself in an afternoon. You could also make similar containers by screwing the steel plate to little pieces of angle iron. Part 2 of this post provides some basic instructions for the welded version shown here.
March 24 2008 | Categories: landscape design • my garden | Tags: Bernard Tschumi • Euphorbia lambii • Parc de la Villette • planters | 5 Comments »
