The work horse of the agave world

Like all of life in the agave world there are the plants that get all the attention and those that do the work.  It is a simple trap we all fall into, posting pictures of that elusive plant we have been after for year, or some new variegate and forgetting about the plants that have been the backbone of our gardens or are actually hardy. So in the hope of redressing the balance I thought I would give one of those overlooked plants it's 15 minutes in the spot light.

So let me introduce agave parryi a plant almost every one who has ever looked at agaves knows about.  It is found in almost every garden center and is only behind agave americana in terms of availability. One of the reasons it is so common is that it is one of the hardier varieties and as such is planted out in dry beds throughout the world. We all rely on it but tend to not give it a second thought.  But look again, few agaves have the range of forms that you find in parryi.  This is the plain green form

This is probably the one most commonly sold, but the leaf shape can vary greatly from thin to almost round. If you don't like the green they come in blue as well.

Surely with that pale blue colour it deserves attention despite being a work horse! This is the only agave I am currently allowing to form a clump and I think if they all stay as blue as the mother then they will rightly attract a lot of attention. Then there are the named varieties, one of my favourites is parry HK1684 (the collection number)

This one tends to have thinner leaves and a good pale blue colour with the added bonus of dark red / burgundy spines.  I saw a photo of someone elses and had to track it down, thankfully they are easy to find. Although not as fast as the normal form they are quick growing once they settle. This one is left under a simple rain cover over winter and never marks (the marks on the lower leaves were there when I bought it). There are a couple of other varieties if you want to make sure you have the full set, one being a more compact form called var patonii, the plant below belongs to a friend.

It is a very distinctive form with thick terminal spines.  Strangely you rarely see this offered in the plain form and are more likely to see the variegated form of a parryi var patonii

Both of these are slow by agave parryi standards, although thankfully they do speed up a bit each year and they can pup from a small size.  The other variegate you will commonly find (partly do to tissue culture now) is agave parryi cream spike.

While this is my lopsided one it can be difficult to tell the difference between this and the other variegated forms coming onto the market and many believe they are all the same form being given different names in different parts of the world. I have limited my searching to these two variegated forms because of this, although a medio-picta form with a central white stripe would probably be welcomed with open arms if I found one.

You may feel we have strayed with the variegated forms. Many people group them with the other pretty plants giving them protection over winter.  No matter how pretty, they are still agave parryi and as such should all have a good cold hardiness.  To test this, I left an agave parryi var patonii variegate and a cream spike out next to the my HK1684 and both came through this terrible winter without any problems at all. From now on all of mine will be outside, all-be-it under a rain cover, freeing up a bit of space in warmer locations for the softer plants.

So next time you look at agave parryi don't just think of it as part of the hardy back bone of your dry bed,  remember it may be a work horse but can also be a thoroughbred.

Echeveria hybrids first flowers

Having spent a few days on the beautiful Dorset coast coast I was going to post about that.  Then I got home to find that my echeveria hybrid is flowering.  I posted about the hybrid before and how pleased I was about its development. So waiting for its first proper flowering season is the last piece of the puzzle and as the Dorset coast will still be there for a few days longer (hopefully) I thought I would show the flowers first.

Echeveria flowers take different forms,  this type would fit in the shepherd's crook style due to the distinctive shape. They match their mother in that respect and are the same as echeveria pulidonis.  The yellow colour is similar as well, although given that echeveria rosea also has yellow flowers that is no surprise.

There are quite a few flower stalks which is always good and the flowers themselves are bigger than for plain pulidonis. It would have been nice if they were a little more different,  but I can't complain that much. They are flowering earlier than Pulidonis although that could just be this year,  it will take a couple of years to confirm their exact flowering period.

At this point I should really be pollinating the flowers with others from the same batch of hybrids.  Then growing the seeds and repeating two or three times.  Then the seeds should hopefully be stable and come true if grown else where. This is how you ensure that seeds produce a standard set of plants and is why producing new hybrids is such a slow process.  This year though I am going to have to wait and all propagation is going to have to be through offsets.  I have taken 6 pups off already and these will be grown to give me a good collection of plants. Maybe next year I'll start mass production.

As for the name, you may be wondering what I decided to call it.  In the end the voting went for echeveria adonis blue. Who knows one day it may appear in a garden center near you.

Clumps or single plants?

When I brought home the pots of agave utahensis at the weekend my OH commented on one of the pots crammed full of plants and how good they looked as mass of leaf and spine. What struck me most was that when I look at the same pot I see a mess and that you can not see the true shape and structure of the indivual plants. This got me thinking about why most people seem to keep agaves as individual plants instead of clumps.

One of my obsessions is keeping my potted agaves as neat as possible, removing leaves, constantly looking at each plant checking for anything that may damage them and removing any offsets as soon as they are big enough (or in my impatience often before). I have always just removed the offsets out of habit, it never crosses my mind to leave them to form a clump.  I don't do this with any other succulents, I have some lovely clumps of aloes and echeverias.  In fact I often damage the roots of other succulents to try and force clumping.  So why not agaves?

For me I suspect it could be something to do with the strong structural form of agaves.  Looking at the plants I like,  they tend to be the more defined structured plants.  No doubt I have mentioned several times that I like the order and neatness they bring (no doubt followed by laughs from my OH as she looks around the mess inside the house).  I think you would loose this order in a clump and maybe that's what stops me.

Strangely in the ground I am more relaxed and the agave parryis in the front have several pups which while I have considered removing them, I have never bothered.  Dry beds, no matter how hard you try never seem to reach the level of neatness you get in pots and so I try not to replicate them, letting the plants grow a bit more naturally.

So are there plants that deserve to be in clumps? One is agave attenuata, there is a lovely clump at Kew and its softer form seems to lend itself to clumps.  But thinking about it imagine some of the other clumps you could have; a clump of agave kissho Kan variegates would look pretty good,  and don't tell her but maybe my OH is right. Imagine a perfectly formed clump of agave utahensis var eborispina. It would definitely be a talking point!

Getting carried away

Well it was always going to happen, no matter how much my OH wished otherwise, I had to make my first purchase of the year at some point. I have been good up until now and held off for as long as possible.  Then yesterday I popped down to one of my local nurseries. It is a weird place mostly a normal garden center but the owner is an avid succulent collector and has used part of the nursery to store spare or unwanted plants.  I have very mixed feelings about it, on one front it is an excellent source of affordable plants (many of my larger and rarer purchases have come fro here), on the other the plants have been ignored and many have died and been binned. It is such a waste and I hate seeing how many amazing and often rare plants have just been left to die. Anyway I posted before about agave utahensis, showing this picture

I had an idea that I had seen some in among the other plants at the nursery and so popped along with a friend to see what was still around. It turned out I as not wrong, and I don't know if it was seeing the plants being so unloved, or something else but I bought one or two:

Do you think I have enough to keep me going?  Before my OH gets too concerned they are not all for me, I have a small group of friends and we try to help each other out.  One of the things we do is to keep an eye out for plants we know the others are looking for. So many of these will be making their way to other parts of the country. The source means that the plants are not labelled so it is very much guesswork,  but there seemed to be three varieties.  The first with the very long terminal spines:

Then a blue version, which at least at this size is my favourite:

And finally the short spine version:

It is going to be great fun trying to untangle these; there are about 20 plants in one of the pots. I will leave those for some other brave soul, but I did untangle one pot.

This pot was full of the longer spined variety and i am still pulling splinters out of my fingers.  It was worth it though:

Having so many plants to play with will give me an opportunity to explore this plants hardiness.  It is well known that agave utahensis is one of the most cold tolerant plants, the one plant I owned up to now has been left under a rain cover every winter and never has any problems.  How it will cope with a British wet winter is unknown.  It is a very slow growing agave and most people are unwilling to risk old plants, I should have enough to mean loosing one would not be an issue. A few of these will be planted out in the dry bed once it warms up a bit more and we shall see how it does.

The shopping year has started, the question is after yesterdays little extravagance  will I be allowed out unsupervised again?

Photo Friday

The start of the flower of one of my favourite plants today, Echeveria Rosea.  I was going to ask if anyone could guess what it was, but decided that was a bit cruel.  I will have to do a full post o this one at some point.

A question of hardiness

They say owners are often like their animals, I wonder if the same is true of gardeners?  I know that over the last few weeks as it has warmed up, my interest in plants has started in earnest again.  I am out in the garden more, reading websites and generally starting to think about new purchases. It's a bit like coming out of hibernation. But is it too early?  We have been having lovely sunny days, but frosts at night,  should I be retreating back under the covers and warmth for a few more weeks?

You see I have a confession to make,  I need heat. A bit of cold is nice for a change,  I can see the beauty in snow, but if it goes on for too long I find myself looking at holiday photos and wondering if I could get time off for a bit of winter sun. I imagine my poor succulents feel exactly the same, instead of a life in some warm climate they are forced to put up with frosts, snow and grey skys.

The cold hardiness of succulents is obviously an enormous topic and a very emotive one.  The last few winters in the UK will probably result in the books being re-written on what we can grow here. (I will save my rant on the minimum temperatures they supply with plants in the UK for another post). A while back I posted about how important I thought it was to learn from your plants and that perhaps the only real way to find out if a plant will cope is to learn from experience.  Having seen the damage last year and listened to others, I had a theory that one way to avoid damage at the mins I have (around -9) is to keep the snow out of the crowns.  So I placed fleece over the agave bed before the snow and removed it once it has stopped. This was the bed during the snow, you can just make out the fleece covering the agaves:

So far this seems to have worked, despite being the coldest December on record, here is the bed at the weekend:

Amazingly not only did all the plants come through unscathed, but there was almost no damage at all (I should really be posting this in a few months when all the danger of frosts and snow is past!)  When I compare this to last year,  or to plants and parts of the dry bed I did not cover, the difference is marked.  I really don't know what I did to deserve such luck, and when I speak to friends about what they lost I can't help but feel guilty to have got away with it. I hope some of it was due to actually watching my plants, learning from mistakes, experiments and talking to others about what their experiences. Some is simply due to the fact that my mins are manageable.

Speaking to others this winter has made me wonder what I would do if I had their minimums, would I cover the garden, or simply grew totally different plants?  But to tell you the truth I simply couldn't live somewhere with serious winters and I am sure my plants will breath a sigh of relief to hear it.

That is not to say I haven't learnt form this winter, it seems snow is not as light as you would think and while the agaves coped fine with the weight, one poor yucca did not.  Next time I will have to put a bit more thought in and give the fleece some support around the softer plants.

First flowers of the year in the dry bed.

Continuing on the positive things happening in the garden the first of the alpines are starting to flower.  When the dry bed was originally planted I purely used succulents, but there were too many gaps so I added a few alpines. Many of these were removed as plants grew or I found other succulents to add, leaving only a few of my favourites.  By far the largest group of alpines were sempervivums and most of these were moved into a sort of trench added to the from of the bed.  These are just starting to grow after winter and it will be months before they look their best again.

The only other alpine I have more than one of are saxifragas which is a varied group of plants.  I have got a lot more selective lately and got rid of all the sprawling ones; they tend to look messy after a while and so were removed.  This only left a few neat clumps and it is these that tend to be the first flowers in the dry bed.  Some have neat delicate little individual flowers like the one here.

Others send out arching flower stalks on which flowers will open over the next few week.

I am not sure if it is because I only have the smaller varieties but I don't have any of the more dramatic forms which can have much larger flowers. I am helping build a rockery at work where there will be more space (something for a future post) and may use that to try out varieties before using them in the garden.

They may be small, but they are the start of the outdoors flowering season that will last for the next 8 months.  It is good to know that from now on there will always be some colour in the dry bed and pots.