A little bonsai echeveria

One of the things I love about this time of year is bringing the plants out of their winter protection, repotting and tidying them up. There is something very satisfying about looking at your plants after doing this, even if they're not at their best the promise is there. I can potter like this for hours, often using tweezers to remove dead and damaged leaves.  My OH watches this with some bemusement as I like to keep the pots immaculate and yet am perfectly happy to leave the rest of the garden scruffy, (and my voluntary contribution to cleaning inside the house is lets just say limited).

The most extreme form of my tidying are attempts to sculpt or bonsai plants. This started through the lack of space and needing to keep plants from growing too quickly.  Most plants I just try to slow down,  but there are a few where this has resulted in plants growing considerable smaller than usual. One I have been playing with over the last couple of years is an echeveria glauca brevifolia. This is basically a small form of echeveria glauca.  Here it is in 2008.

Every year I repot it, trimming the roots slightly to allow it to stay in the same pot.  This is it today:

The largest head is about 2cm which is about a quarter of the size of the plants I have planted out. It gets better every year with the head becoming more defined. I feel I now need to decided what to do with it.  Sadly there are more heads one side than the other as you can see from this next photo.

So I am contemplating cutting out the middle row of heads, as it is these that are very one sided.

As I have said many times before, I can rush things like this only to regret it afterwards.  Maybe it time to actually leave one alone to get on with it.  If I stopped all pottering with the potted plants then the rest of the garden may stand a chance of actually being looked after.