guildfordcycads

Aloe wollastonii: Wollaston’s Aloe – Ugandan Native

🌿 Discover the Perfect Plants for Your Space! 🌿 Explore our handpicked collection of cycads, aloes, seeds, and more to transform your garden or landscape. Shop Now Description and characteristics Aloe wollastonii, Wollaston’s Aloe, is a striking succulent belonging to the Asphodelaceae family. This rare species, native to Uganda, stands out with its vibrant coloration […]

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Greenhouse Grower to Grower Podcast: Hoffman Nursery Heads Into 2025 With Big Plans and New Leadership

Greenhouse Grower to Grower Podcast: Hoffman Nursery Heads Into 2025 With Big Plans and New Leadership

In this episode of Greenhouse Grower to Grower, we talk to the management team at Hoffman Nursery about what the company has planned for the coming year.

The post Greenhouse Grower to Grower Podcast: Hoffman Nursery Heads Into 2025 With Big Plans and New Leadership appeared first on Greenhouse Grower.

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Road gutters lined with rocks?

Road gutters lined with rocks?

We live in the tropics with heavy rains during the wet season. Our road is quite steep and we’ve dug a gutter next to it to allow the water to run off. The usual way to line gutters here is with half-open concrete tubes, which works really well. We however have lots of big rocks scattered around which have been dug up by the previous owner. Would that suffice to slow the water and stop the soil from eroding? And would it be beneficial to plant species that control erosion (deep roots, such as canna indica) in the gutter or better to plant them on the banks?

Any advice appreciated!

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Need help. Soil for vegetable garden

Need help. Soil for vegetable garden

Hi team, I currently have tomato’s, cucumbers, capsicums and spring onion in large pots and all doing very well.

I dug out my lawn and would like to plant veggies next season.

The ph level is at around 6.5-7.0

I cant tell if its loamy or sandy

These are some pictures. I watered the soil about 36 hours ago – still a little bit dampish.

If its alright, then i would add compost, manure some organic matter to it and mix in.

But if its not a good base, i dont want to waste time.

Im enjoying the gardening – fairly new to it all.

I have fruit trees planted in the same soil (plum, fig, apricot, orange, mandarine, lemon) which are all producing fruit incase that matters.

Would love some feedback/advice

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Aloe pachygaster: The Thick-bellied Aloe – Robust Form

🌿 Discover the Perfect Plants for Your Space! 🌿 Explore our handpicked collection of cycads, aloes, seeds, and more to transform your garden or landscape. Shop Now Morphology and Anatomy Aloe pachygaster, the thick-bellied aloe, earns its common name honestly. This fascinating succulent distinguishes itself from other aloes with its remarkably thick stem, a feature

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Aloe massawana: The Massawa Aloe – Eritrean Species

🌿 Discover the Perfect Plants for Your Space! 🌿 Explore our handpicked collection of cycads, aloes, seeds, and more to transform your garden or landscape. Shop Now Description and Morphology Aloe massawana, a captivating and rare aloe hailing from the rocky landscapes of Eritrea, stands as a unique gem amongst succulents. Its striking appearance sets

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Aloe arenicola: The Sand Aloe – Coastal Succulent

🌿 Discover the Perfect Plants for Your Space! 🌿 Explore our handpicked collection of cycads, aloes, seeds, and more to transform your garden or landscape. Shop Now Identifying Aloe arenicola Picture this: you’re trekking through the coastal dunes of South Africa, the sun warming your face, and the wind whipping through the sparse vegetation. Suddenly,

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What are hybrid Aloinopsis, really, and what is a landrace?

What are hybrid Aloinopsis, really, and what is a landrace?

 

Santa Fe Botanic emailed me recently and asked how to define and categorize some plants into their database, which I grew, and which Lauren Springer used in the memorial garden for David Salman. These are the “Aloinopsis hybrids” gleaned from friends and then re-grown and bred myself for some years. 

Answering the question leads to a brain-twisting philosophical discussion I wanted to share with you that I’ve been mulling on for the last year.

What are the “Aloinopsis hybrid” plants? 

” Well, it’s a complicated answer:

Those plants are truly unknown in exact species, and even genera, because they are a “landrace” of complex mesembs hybrids, open pollinated, from many generations in gardens. We’ve been calling them “ASx” in shorthand because most of them are in part, by a little or a lot, Aloinopsis spathulata. (But I suspect just a few individuals don’t have that species in their parentage!)  But they include genes from several other species and at least two other genera, and science hasn’t given such intergeneric crosses actual genus names!  (Genera: Aloinopsis, Titanopsis, Nananthus, and sometimes others like Stomatium, Hereroa.  If you are not familiar with the concept of “landracing,” here’s a little wiki description. That sort of helps describe the situation, which is quite messy against traditional notions of cleanly defining organisms. The ASx plants are like if you could have a herd of things that are varying mixes of horse, zebra, donkey, and giraffe… which isn’t possible for those animals and why I think the plants are so intriguing! What on earth with the latin name be for such a beast!?
Two answers: 
1. A truly scientific name for them would be Aizoaceae: Titanopsis-group genera hybrid landrace.  
2. An easier but colloquial name is “Aloinopsis kin & hybrids.” (But like I wrote above, technically a small minority of the plants probably don’t have any Aloinopsis in them!) 
Further notes, which nod to history and people’s legacy, in the spirit of the garden: these plants are a mixed “herd” if you will, descending from plants grown and bred by David Salman, John Stireman (UT), Kelly Grummons (CO), Floyd Jacketta (UT), Bill Adams (CO), and perhaps Jeff Ottersberg. Much but not all of the seed was probably collected in Africa by Steven Brack. I collated plants from everyone and re-selected progeny. 
Once, when I asked David Salman what he felt was the most missing vacancy/representation of style or plants in public gardens in Santa Fe, and without hesitating, he said “African mesembs.”  I think it is beautiful that it should come full circle like this. 
My last tangent on this.  The idea of landracing such plants, to me, harkens back to the relationship native Americans had/have with plants- they created and spread landrace plants and blurred the lines between species and domesticity/wildness. (Like the wild potatoes, devil’s horns for eating/weaving, and heirloom/feral agaves…not to mention amaranth, tomatoes, corn, peppers…) They didn’t see a hard line between nature and humanity and I think that is beautiful…”

Indeed, there are tons of plants in the Americas whose distribution suggests (or screams) that humans were a key “dispersal agent” in moved them around, and they naturalized. I’ve recently been on a reading bender learning that there are wild/domestic potatoes to the southwestern US, even in Colorado! 

There are agaves that grow around ruins in Arizona which are not related to the nearby wild ones, and one awesome researcher, Wendy Hodgson, put in the massive effort for years to sort out their genetics to find that the plants were essentially “heirloom” veggies carried up by early Americans from modern day Mexico and went feral when they quit being cultivated in Arizona. For natural-history geeks like me who love to have living specimens in our gardens with such stories, unfortunately those agave are probably not quite hardy up here in Colorado… 

But back to the Aloinopsis/Mesembs:

John Stireman wrote an authoritative article for International Rock Gardener on it, here. (His garden of them, above. )The annual NARGS seed exchange, which I think is still going at the moment for a few weeks, would be the best source of hybrid seed, coming from John and his brother. 

My own project has been planting them in number in cold enough places to kill m any of them (“cull the herd”) in an effort to push them as far as possible for winter hardiness. 

There are several mailorder sources for this group of plants, hybrids or not : Ethical Desert and Cold Hardy Cactus, and of course, David’s legacy, High Country Gardens

I had only heard the word “landrace” in the context of heirloom/heritage domestic animal breeds, so I was mindblown to learn There is a book on the powerful, practical and under-documented subject of Landrace Veggies. Landracing has supplied all of humanity’s food until recently “for centuries by illiterate farmers…” (paraphrasing the book). Thanks to the author, who gave me some seeds, I’m one small link in a chain that is creating a landrace of hardy pistachios. In a few years, I’ll be looking for a client who is interested in such things to carry the torch and plant a small orchard of the seedlings I am growing.  

For me, I found it easy to extrapolate from this lovely, fun, quirky little book to apply the idea to flowers, natives, et cetera. For years now I have been using landracing, as a rule, in my wildflower meadow seed projects.  For some plants, it’s been the secret to success. After all, what is today, and this new year, but just a fine line between the past and the future?

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