solana succulents

Indulge me, if you would, a quick return to last month’s San Diego County Fair. There, in the flower show going on in the botan­i­cal build­ing, I ran across this one class they had for “most unusual foliage.” Flow­ers are great, but so are leaves. This lit­tle dis­play included a few pretty spe­cial examples.

Here you see var­ie­gated milk this­tle and a fuzzy kalan­choe leaf, thick and rigid like many lay­ers of felt.

This was the win­ning leaf, from a suc­cu­lent echevaria. Not the pret­ti­est thing on earth, but it def­i­nitely fit the “most unusual” category.

While at the fair I ran across the dis­play I ran across the dis­play mounted by Solana Suc­cu­lents. The place has been around for a while, but I’d never taken the short trip to north county to check it out. This past week­end I took John up for a quick visit.

Head­ing north, once you clear the thin atmos­phere of Del Mar, you come upon a chain of fun, funky lit­tle beach towns on the way up the coast. A visit to Solana Beach and neigh­bor­ing Encini­tas will give you some com­fort that the 1960s never went away very far, though they did get a lit­tle rein­ter­preted and gentrified.

Solana Suc­cu­lents occu­pies the out­door spaces of a lit­tle house that’s been con­verted into a shop. I liked its tight, funky feel. You’ll find lit­tle suc­cu­lent gifts, big­ger land­scape spec­i­mens, as well as some wild curiosi­ties that’ll prob­a­bly keep a con­nois­seur happy. With so many pointy, sharp plants around, this is no place to take your tod­dler. But for two peo­ple who find suc­cu­lents totally cool it was a great way to spend part of an afternoon.

Here’s a brief gallery of some of the hun­dreds of neat plants there. I tried to get the names, but a few plants weren’t labeled. And beyond that there were some unknowns mixed into the offerings.

A cool red aloe or gaster­aloe hybrid.

Another aloe or aloe hybrid with cool red sum­mer coloring.

Aloe andon­gen­sis, a species with gen­tle spots and a dis­tinct gold aura.

The fuzzed flower buds of Aloe tomen­tosa. The plant is a pretty basic green aloe, but these woolly flow­ers make up for the ordi­nary plant.

Espos­toa lanata: Was it Freud who said, ‘Some­times a suc­cu­lent is just a succulent?’

One of the var­ie­gated forms of Agave lophan­tha, a nice lit­tle spiky bun­dle not much over a foot across at this point.

A nice boxed euphor­bia specimen.

Euphor­bia polyg­ona, one of many Old-World euphor­bias that mimic New-World cactus.

And a real New World cac­tus, one of the weirdly blue-colored species in the genus Pilosocereus. The owner needed to look up the exact species, but he said it wasn’t the more com­mon azureus.

I really flaked on the name of this one. Maybe one of the stapelia rel­a­tives? EDIT 7/16/2010: Thanks to Candy, who has iden­ti­fied this plant as Euphor­bia pug­ni­formis f. cristata.

There was this short lit­tle plant with a bul­bous, suc­cu­lent base. It had fewer than a half-dozen leaves. But what stun­ning leaves. I thought they had a great gold-dust effect to them. And then John sug­gested that I wipe the pot­ting soil off the leaves. Okay, no more gold dust effect, but still a great plant. Not all suc­cu­lents are squat, spiny, leaf­less lit­tle audi­tions for a hor­ror movie. This plant is proof. But I think a lot of the other plants I’ve shown are fur­ther proof of that.


July 16 2010 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: • • • | 9 Comments »

something yellow this way comes

I was writ­ing recently about how my new raised bed was a yel­low exclu­sion zone except once a year when the kahili gin­ger (Hedy­chium gard­ne­r­i­anum) came into bloom. That time is now. The plant began Thurs­day, and should keep going, on and off, for just a few weeks.

Kahili ginger

Kahili gin­ger

In my early teen years I was involved in the dark under­ground world of com­pet­i­tive rose and flower shows, a sub­cul­ture fraught with as much dan­ger and intrigue as the illicit drug net­work or the world of show­ing dogs. My only best-of-show attempt came with a tall spike of this gin­ger, the best exam­ple of it that I’d ever grown. The stem was in peak bloom the morn­ing of the judg­ing, and the entire audi­to­rium glowed with the flow­ers’ amaz­ing fragrance.

The plant that I have now is a piece of that first plant, which itself was an off­set that had been pimped me by one of my mother’s friends. Here in San Diego kahili gin­ger just chugs along mind­ing its own busi­ness, ask­ing only for occa­sional water. It’s hard to imag­ine that this plant is con­sid­ered a nasty inva­sive species in some trop­i­cal regions. In fact, one site in Hawai’i rec­om­mends: “Because this is an extremely inva­sive plant, it should be destroyed when found.” Read­ing that was like find­ing out a loved mem­ber of the fam­ily is wanted in three Euro­pean coun­tries for crimes against human­ity. Not my pre­cious ginger!

The key dif­fer­ence between here and there is one of water. In warm, frost-free areas with abun­dant water it can eas­ily become an unwel­come pest. But it stops where the sup­ple­men­tal water stops, and the local ten inches or less a year of nat­ural rain can’t sus­tain it out­side of watered gar­den spaces.

If I were ever to retire to Hawai’i it’d be a tough choice. Could I leave this plant behind?

August 09 2008 | Categories: my garden • plant profiles | Tags: • • • • | 2 Comments »