Bamboo and More

I’m excited because two plants that have never flowered in our garden are blooming now. The first is an Australian cordyline (Cordyline australis), one of two in our backyard. Check this post for background info and photos. Cordyline australis Read...

Building on yesterday’s coverage of the 2013 Sacramento Cactus & Succulent Society show and sale, this post will show you some of the many plants members entered in the juried show. While it is true that the winners of the top prizes are likely t...

This weekend (May 4 and 5, 2013) is the Sacramento Cactus & Succulent Society’s 53rd annual show and sale. It is being held at Shepard Garden and Arts Center adjacent to McKinley Park. For more information, go to the SCSS web site. To whet your a...

A few days ago I showed you some cacti that are currently in bloom at the UC Botanical Garden in Berkeley. While my cactus collection is nothing compared to theirs, this is the season for cactus flowers so if you have even just a dozen plants, chances ...

A few years ago we had a tower of jewels (Echium wildpretii) blooming in our front yard. It produced copious amounts of seeds, and two of those seedlings are growing outside our front yard fence. Since this is their 2nd year, I expected them to bloom t...

After I was done at the UC Botanical spring plant sale, I walked over to my favorite areas in the garden, the New World Desert and the Southern African Collection. Somebody had told me that the puyas were in bloom. “In bloom” turned out to be a bi...

Last Saturday I did something I’d been wanting to do for a long time: I attended a plant sale at UC Botanical Garden in Berkeley. As an on-again, off-again member and somewhat regular visitor (if once or twice a year counts) I’m fairly familiar wit...

A couple of weekends ago I attended the spring plant sale at the Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek, CA. If you’ve followed my blog for any length of time, you know that this is one of my favorite public gardens in Northern California and that I tr...

The botanical highlight of our recent visit to my parents-in-law in Mount Shasta was seeing the manzanitas in bloom. In Mount Shasta manzanitas are everywhere. I don’t think many homeowners plant them; they’re just part of the natural landscape. ...

On our recent spring break trip to Santa Barbara I managed to squeeze in a visit to a nursery that came highly recommended: Terra Sol Garden Center. As it turned out, it was only a couple of miles from our hotel. It’s not a big nursery but the second...