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 »

fairly cool plants

On my recent trip to the San Diego County Fair the hor­ti­cul­tural dis­plays seemed to divide into two big cat­e­gories: exhibits that fea­tured cool designs (usu­ally entered by a land­scape design firm or indi­vid­ual) and those that fea­ture some pretty cool plants (mostly in exhibits assem­bled by spe­cialty nurseries).

I’ve talked enough about the cool designs. Here are some fairly cool plants. Some have been around for cen­turies, oth­ers are fairly new to our gar­dens. Hope­fully the new intro­duc­tions are fairly tame, oth­er­wise you might be see­ing here the new exotic weed pests that’ll be keep­ing us busy for the next hun­dred years.

Ptilo­tus exal­ta­tus \‘Plat­inum Wal­laby,\’ a plant that has been show­ing up in nurs­eries this past year.

Oh look: Another note­wor­thy plant, another ptilo­tus, Down Under.

Christ­mas in July? The Ecke poin­set­tia ranch folks who sup­ply a huge per­cent­age of the world’s poin­set­tias were show­ing off this new white vari­ety, Polar Bear. My county used to be poin­set­tia cen­tral for the world, but cheaper pro­duc­tion costs have dri­ven a lot of that to Cen­tral America.

Char­treuse, green, white and near-black: Lob­u­laria Snow Princes, two kinds of ipo­moea, with Coleus Col­or­Blaze Alli­ga­tor Tears.

Gera­nium crispum, var­ie­gated form. This is one of many foliage plants that have flow­ers that don’t seem to add much to the foliage.

Gosh, yet another note­wor­thy plant with a ‘Note­wor­thy Plant’ sign next to it. (Kin­duv reminds me of those turnoffs labeled ‘scenic view­point’ on high­ways through spec­tac­u­lar land­scapes, as if you needed the sign to tell you you were look­ing at some­thing scenic or–in this case–noteworthy.) This was labeled a ‘Pine Nee­dle Fern,’ but not with its species name. My quick web trawl didn’t turn up much with that name, only a fact that it’s con­sid­ered one of the more pri­mae­val kinds of fern. Very cool, what­ever it is.

Rice flower, Ozotham­nus dios­mi­folius, a plant drought-tolerant selec­tion that, like the ptilo­tus plants, comes from Aus­tralia. You’d think they’d have run out of their notable plant signs by now.

Men­tion the word suc­cu­lent and peo­ple have visions of a fairly desert-ey land­scape. Here’s a dis­play by Cor­dova Gar­dens that instead comes off as a really lush flower arrangement.

Deute­ro­coh­nia bre­v­i­fo­lia, a fairly amaz­ing suc­cu­lent. (Edit: this is actu­ally a bromeliad!)

Mam­mi­laria parkin­so­ni­ana, a fairly amaz­ing cactus.

A nice mixed plant­ing of cac­tus and suc­cu­lents at the Solana Suc­cu­lents display.

A gor­geous pur­ple prickly pear Opun­tia Santa Rita, part of the Solana Suc­cu­lents exhibit.

Agave victoria-reginae, a nor­mally prim lit­tle bun­dle of green and white botan­i­cal joy. Check out bloom stalk in the next photo, however…

OMG, when that thing blooms, stand back! This lit­tle two-foot plant has prob­a­bly pro­duced a twelve-foot inflo­res­cence. How do you design with this plant? Is it a fore­ground plant? Or some­thing for the back­ground? Not a bad quandary to be in.


July 03 2010 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: • | 7 Comments »

more from the county fair

Let me share my favorite gar­den design from this year’s San Diego County Fair. If I tell you that I grew up on Sun­set Mag­a­zine and that I fre­quented the Sun­set demon­stra­tion gar­dens at the Los Ange­les County Arbore­tum in the 1970s, you can see why a gar­den like this pushes my but­tons. This space my North County’s Akana Design really embraces the Sun­set aes­thetic of com­bin­ing mod­ern design with liv­able out­door spaces. (Ignore the ugly black shade cloth back­ground that’s been draped over the plas­tic white lat­tice that the fair pro­vided for their displays.)

I’ve been known to grouse about out­door spaces where the gar­den has been sac­ri­ficed at the expense of adding yet another room to a McMan­sion, but the plants in this design seemed to be inte­grated into the results and not so much an after­thought. This space fea­tures a com­pact eat­ing space on gold-colored decom­posed gran­ite, with a whiter stone mulch used for most of the grow­ing areas. Two sim­ple wooden walls pro­vide some pro­tec­tion, at the same time they define the space and pro­vide a back­drop for plantings.

A sin­gle lounge chair sits off to one side at the end of a DG walk­way. A stone in front serves as an ottoman. When the chair is stored indoors for the win­ter, the ottoman stone could serve as an accent at the end of the lit­tle path. The seat is sur­rounded by fra­grant rose­mary and cleve­land sage, as well as plants that pro­vide visual inter­est and variety.

This detail shows some of the plants used to pro­vide tex­tural inter­est: loman­dra, phormium, aeo­nium, tea tree (I think), and–uh oh–Mexican feather grass. Well I had to find some­thing about the plant­i­ngs to cri­tique. Might I sug­gest using the native Aris­tida pur­purea instead? Sorry to quib­ble too much. Over­all I thought it was a really suc­cess­ful presentation.

Among the other dis­plays, Pond-Ology fea­tured a lit­tle yoga deck in the mid­dle of a trop­i­cal par­adise. It pushed my Sun­set but­tons a bit too.

I’m not into mak­ing a zoo of cap­tive angels in my back yard, but I thought this menagerie by Blue Pacific Land­scape Design was well done. I espe­cially like how the color of the blue pots echoes through the plant­i­ngs around them. The cas­cad­ing pink gera­ni­ums pro­vide nice con­trast. Pots full of blue flow­ers would have been way too matchy-matchy.

At this gar­den show, as at many oth­ers these days, one of the big themes is green walls. Anan­das­capes incor­po­rated this wall into a pretty mod­ern display.

Take four green walls and attach them side to side and you have a green obelisk. The Good Earth Plant Co. and Green­scape Build­ing pro­vided this 3D ver­sion of the flat green wall.

You could walk around it and look in detail at the var­i­ous suc­cu­lents that made the plant­ing possible.

Liv­ing in a near-desert I’m still not con­vinced that green walls make a whole pile of sense. Why not plant an easy-care vine instead? But you’ve got admit they’re spec­tac­u­lar, and “spec­tac­u­lar” works well at a noisy county fair with lots of distractions.

In my next and final post from the fair I’ll show you some of the things that inter­ested me most: Plants!

June 30 2010 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: • • • | 12 Comments »

at the county fair

Are gar­den­ers ter­ror­ists? You’d think so look­ing at the sign posted out­side the San Diego County Fair.

This gar­dener took advan­tage of the “Fur­lough Fri­day” deal for state employ­ees (free admis­sion!) and checked out the offer­ings of the fair for the first time in half a decade. I guess the ratio­nale of free admis­sion was to get more peo­ple in the gate to par­take of the rides and stunt food–you know, the bizarre offer­ings that often involve impal­ing some­thing on a stick, stick­ing it in bat­ter, and then deep-frying it. I searched all over for the worst of the worst stunt food but the best (worst?) I could find was a stand offer­ing “fried Twinkie lattes”–really noth­ing more weird than a vanilla latte–and this trailer sell­ing choco­late cov­ered bacon. Nei­ther dish really seemed to be deep fried, so I guess they’re get­ting with the health-conscious kick…

My main des­ti­na­tion was the out­door gar­den dis­plays, where the main point of each dis­play seemed to be either attract­ing new cus­tomers to the land­scape firms there or–in the case of the non-profit insti­tu­tions and gar­den clubs–education. The fair’s never been about land­scape design as a high art, but there’s always inter­est­ing stuff there.

If there was theme to the dis­plays this year, “edi­bles” seemed to be the word, keep­ing up the health-conscious theme of the not-deep-fried chocolate-covered bacon. This dis­play by the San Diego Botanic Gar­den in Coop­er­a­tion with the San Diego Water Author­ity won the prize for the best edi­ble land­scape. The dis­play also won an award for the exhibit that arranged plants in a way that demon­strated “good taste.”

It fea­tured food crops and orna­men­tals of all sorts as long as they fit into the purple-pink-green-silver palette, and demon­strated that a gar­den with veg­gies could be as pulled together as any other gar­den. In its com­bi­na­tion of cool-weather crops (such as pur­ple cab­bage) with warm-weather ones (like basil and squash) it was also a reminder that this is a gar­den show than a real-world garden.

San Diego Botanic Gar­den dis­play: A fence row planted with orna­men­tals, kale and squash.


Here are a few more pho­tos of dis­plays that played with the edi­bles theme:

Arti­chokes and olive trees in a space designed by Lane McClel­land and Lau­rie Roberts.

Orna­men­tals and veg­gies hang­ing in burlap, also in the McClelland-Roberts garden.


Grow what you love–the entrance to the same McClelland-Roberts gar­den, fea­tur­ing corn, chard, chives and other edibles.

Wendy Slijk’s dis­play showed off this hang­ing pot with squash.


Home Depot’s entry fea­tured a lit­tle grape vineyard.

A scare­crow guard­ing veg­gie beds in a dis­play by the San Diego Hor­ti­cul­tural Society.

In addi­tion to edi­bles, drink­ables got to play a role, as in this dis­play of Agave tequi­lana by the Palo­mar Cac­tus and Suc­cu­lent Soci­ety. This might not be one of the great land­scape agaves, but how can you fault a plant that is the source of tequila?


Erigeron glau­cus cv. Boun­ti­ful at the Tree of Life Nurs­ery display.

I kept my eye out for uses of native plants, but there were almost none. Part of that is prob­a­bly because the major­ity of the charis­matic flow­er­ing natives do their thing at the end of win­ter or dur­ing spring. The one main excep­tion was a small dis­play by native plant spe­cial­ist Tree of Life Nursery.

Brit­tons chalk dud­leya and red mon­keyflower in the Tree of Life Nursery’s display.


Inside, in the adja­cent exhibits build­ing, there was a flower show going on, with roses and dahlias and glad­i­o­lus and lots of cub­bies with flower arrange­ments. And that’s where I saw a few more natives, where they had a cat­e­gory for cut native flow­ers. So there was more mon­keyflower here, along with one of the bush pop­pies (Den­drome­con) and some matil­ija poppies.

Really, who doesn’t love these matil­i­jas? The last photo is of one of them. Next post I’ll share some other sightings.


June 28 2010 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: • • | 8 Comments »