On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
Mary G
In 2018 I took my teenaged housemate and his girlfriend at that time to Sherman Gardens and Library in Costa Mesa. CA. I submitted two sets of photos from that visit to On the Road, but the third set that I never got around to choosing was of their the cacti and succulents, the plants I love the most for our changing climate in SoCal. I had seen a photo of one of their borders in a magazine and fallen in love. My front yard is in its fifth year of me trying to replicate it. It’ll never happen exactly, because I don’t have their greenhouses, army of paid/volunteer gardeners, and rich patrons, but it’s getting to where I want it.
This is a closeup of a giant agave that I love; I don’t know the species name. The bright yellow color is extremely unusual; I’ve been looking for one that’s even close to this shade for years. I asked if they got seeds from it, and was saddened to hear that it doesn’t breed true, which accounts for its rarity.
This is the border the yellow agave anchors. You can see its bottom leaves on the left.
Pots of donkey tails and echeverias under the yellow agave. Getting varied plant heights with mounds and rocks is something they do so well at Sherman’s. I am not as good at it, but housemate B and I are getting better with practice.
Detail of a section of another border: miniature variety of senecio on the right, with slabs of rock enclosing rows of echeverias on the left. Graphic elements using succulents are so appealing, but as we’ve learned, not easy to keep looking like this. Some plants grow faster and get bigger than the others; some plants die and leave gaps; critters pull out the rocks looking for tasty worms and grubs for dinner.
Another agave that’s much smaller and less yellow. I think the smaller dark green agave with brown tips on its leaves on the bottom left is a variety developed for the Crystal Palace in London and named for Queen Victoria. It is quite slow growing and was thought to be hard to cultivate, and thus extremely expensive when I started to learn succulents. Turns out it propagates easily from seed and enough commercial growers planted fields full of them 20 years ago that they are sold all SoCal over for no more money than any other of the nicer common agaves. Amateurs hoping to make a fortune on Etsy and eBay learned this to their dismay.
Sherman’s has several displays of gorgeous and rare cacti, but since I’m a klutz who can stab myself no matter how much garden PPE I wear, I don’t grow many and didn’t take a lot of pictures of them.
More cacti with some succulents as well.
This is a bit of a cheat, it’s a close up of dwarf ice plant flowers in my garden February of this year. I haven’t been out there to work much since the lockdowns started. Republican Fox-watching neighbors and complete strangers have come up unmasked to offer help, or even hugs and kisses. Nobody got close, because I was loud and rude, but it’s hard to have fun constantly looking over my shoulder.
eclare
Sherman Gardens is gorgeous! I can’t imagine the work that they require.
satby
I always think landscaping with native and climate appropriate plants is so attractive! You and your helpers have done a wonderful job MaryG, it really looks great. And you don’t have to water, bonus!
MazeDancer
What wonderful photos!
Dorothy A. Winsor
I particularly like the second picture with that rock border, but all of these show succulents as landscaping in a way I hadn’t seen before here in the upper Midwest.
WaterGirl
I had no idea that a succulents garden could be so beautiful! Some of these photos are like works of art, and of course you had to include the ice plant! (Which I had never heard of until one was posted in a Sunday Garden Chat.
Achrachno
I think (99% sure) the “yellow Agave” is actually a member of the genus Furcraea. I don’t have a guess as to species, but Furcraea is a much smaller group than Agave so running it down shouldn’t be too hard.
I don’t know what someone meant by saying these don’t “breed true” but assume that they meant seed reproduction leads to variable offspring due to genetic variability. But, in my experience the common cultivars of these (or at least the most common cultivar) produces hundreds of miniature plantlets in place of fruits on the giant inflorescences, so getting exact copies of the mother plant should be easy.
StringOnAStick
Man, I love succulents and especially succulent gardens, thanks!
I’m watching the snow fall as we experience our first real winter storm in our new city/state/home, and dreaming about landscaping next year. I think next summer will just be hardscaping and getting the grass out of the existing beds plus stabilizing the mounted beds that have gravity leading to burying the fence.
J R in WV
Pretty sweet, that Sherman Garden place! If you get anywhere close you will have a beautiful area to enjoy outdoors when weather and Trump Plague allows.
Thanks for sharing these photos of such a beautiful place!
Balloon Juice and the jackals are the very best!
Origuy
Those are some impressive gardens. My mom had an echeveria called hen & chicken in our yard. It’s an alpine plant, so it was able to survive Indiana winters. It put up a big stalk when it bloomed and people came from all over to see it.
JanieM
Love the colors in the second one especially, but all of them are brightening my day.
hotshoe
@Origuy:
For you and others who live zone5 or south of zone5, I can suggest a mail-order nursery High Country Gardens that includes many cold hardy plants, native plants from the Rocky Mountains, and a selection of cacti and semi-hardy succulents. No Echevaria, but they’ve got Sedums supposedly hardy to zone 4.
I haven’t done business with them in a decade (because no more room in the garden) so I don’t know if anything has changed, but when I ordered from them before I was completely happy with the plants.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@WaterGirl: Ice plant is planted all along the freeways in N CA (and probably in S CA but I don’t know from personal experience) so it is very common and familiar to Californians. It must be tough and drought tolerant for such use, obviously.
I love the Agave plants!
Dan B
Looks like a wonderful garden. I hope that BIG, or you, would photograph the desert garden at the Huntington. It is huge and eminently photographic. We’ve been twice and have hundreds of photos on an old mostly defunct computer.
Dan B
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): I believe Ice Plant is considered invasive in some parts of California. It is planted along roads in SoCal, or was in the last time I visited in the 90’s.
stinger
What an amazing range of shapes among those plants! And I admire the patience of whoever collected and “painted” with those small rocks in the second photo.