It seems to be a never-ending desire to add interest to the landscape, but choosing plants for the High Desert is not without its challenges — cold winters, hot summers, intense sunlight, drying wind, alkaline soil, limited water and so forth. Using succulents, which include but are not limited to cactus, can be a way to address these issues on a grand scale, in small containers or anywhere in between. Considerations for growing succulents include sun exposure, soil, water and irrigation, and design. Succulents make great gardening enhancements for front yards, pathways, side gardens, slopes and terraces. Succulents tend to grow toward the direction of the greatest sun exposure. Applying this knowledge
can help keep the plants from encroaching into areas they don’t belong.
For succulents to thrive rather than merely survive, they need soil with adequate drainage and infrequent watering (once or twice a week during the growing season, and every two or three weeks when they are dormant). I tend to let “Mother Nature” take care of the watering during the winter, which allows them to dehydrate slightly, helping them to withstand freezing temperatures a little better. I have a container with a variety of succulents in it. I tend to water it once a week or so, and I bring it inside when the temperatures dip into the 20s, since I don’t know that all of them will take the cold.
Succulents offer a rainbow of colors provided by the leaves and flowers. Sizzling leaf colors can be bronze, blue, silver, crimson, chartreuse, lavender, green and variegated, and the flowers can be even brighter. And, many of them change their colors in response to season, climate and growing conditions.
Succulents are an easy plant to include in themed and specialty gardens. Whether you are landscaping for fire safety, desert and cactus gardens, labyrinths, geometric patterns and more, succulents can offer the shapes, colors and textures to create a number of dazzling effects. If your gardening space is limited, they even work well in potted arrangements, wreaths and topiaries.
An important thing to consider for those of us wanting to grow succulents in colder climates (remember winter) is to remember to check the labels for cold hardiness when you purchase succulents or any other plant. Just because you can buy them here, doesn’t mean they will grow here. Succulents that are appropriate for cold climates include many cacti, yuccas, agaves, ice plants, Lewisias, sedums and sempervivums. An author I especially enjoy, Debra Lee Baldwin, has written three books that offer a plethora of possibilities for lending more visual appeal to the landscape
— “Designing with Succulents,” “Succulent Container Gardens” and Succulents Simplified.” The author does a great job of describing, and illustrating with photographs, the many characteristics of succulents, and the books even include sections about plants that will survive the USDA zones 8 and below (the High Desert is, for the most part, USDA zone 8b or Sunset zone 10/11), something that is often ignored in other books. Happy gardening!
High Desert resident Micki Brown is a drought-tolerant plant specialist with a master’s degree in Plant Science. Send questions to be answered in the column to HorticultureHelp@aol.com.
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