GARDENING:
With a border of succulents, you can sit back and enjoy the view
SUCCULENTS are a lazy gardener’s dream. For years, they can cling to life in the same pots, unloved and seldom watered. But with minimal care, the same desiccated wrecks can be made beautiful. In their natural habitat, succulents are adapted to tolerate extreme conditions. Mexican agaves and African jade plants can endure scorching days followed by chilly nights. Others can survive for years without rain, or subsist in unforgiving rock crevices.
That toughness makes them excellent for outdoor displays. Most can shrug off anything a British summer can throw at them. So unlike petunias, which hate wet weather, succulents soldier on regardless.
You can create outdoor displays with succulents and go away for weeks. After a month without water, they’ll still be fine. Try that with busy lizzies, fuchsias or begonias and you’d come home to dead plants.
On a south-facing patio last year, I blended echeverias,
aeoniums and jade plants with our usual summer show of pelargoniums. To my surprise, the succulents blended in attractively.
The stars were echeverias — shapely plants, whose fleshy leaf rosettes have a grape- skin bloom. Subtle leaf colours showed through that pearly surface film, ranging from pink, blue-grey and mauve to bronze.
BEAUTIFUL DISPLAYS
LEAVES are the main features with succulent plants. But the flowers can be pretty on echeverias and striking on large aloes. The aloe, Aloiampelos striatula, survives winters in my cold garden. The fleshy, toothed leaves and orange-yellow poker flowers make a great summer show. But it’s a sprawling yob of a plant, ugly in winter.
Echeverias are always attractive, and make fine houseplants, too. Echeveria Perle von Nurnberg develops shapely rosettes whose colours are like thunderclouds lit by a low sun.
E. Purple Pearl, offered by thompson-morgan.com, looks almost identical, but colours vary according to conditions. The frilled leaf edges of E. Curly Pearl, though, are unmistakable.
E. gibbiflora has larger leaves in looser rosettes and all echeverias produce attractive flowers. Among bigger succulents,
Aeonium Zwartkop is a beauty with bronze- black, spoony leaves. Shaped like a miniature tree, it can grow 2m high.
Jade plants, Crassula ovata, usually languish on sunny windowsills. But outside they grow more freely and bear flowers. Among carpeting succulents,
Delosperma cooperi has narrow, fleshy leaves and is border-line hardy. Rose- purple flowers smother the plants in summer.
THRIVING ON NEGLECT
COMING from drought-ridden terrain, succulents are the ultimate low- maintenance plants. I pot mine in a 50-50 mix of peat-free compost and coarse grit, with a few slow-release fertiliser granules added.
Most are easy to propagate. In spring, take cuttings, rooting those in sandy compost. As always, bottom heat speeds rooting. Many succulents will also grow from leaf cuttings.
Full sun is best for almost all. Rosette-forming echeverias and low-growing succulents thrive in conventional pots. But the fleshy leaves of large plants are surprisingly weighty. Tal l varieties will be top-heavy and need heavy, stable pots.
When October comes, move potted succulents into shelter. Sustained frost will kill, but with fleece laid over them each night and a gentle to moderate winter, they sail through.
THIS is a good week to start growing annual sweet peas. Seeds sown now will produce beautiful and fragrant flowers from June onwards. Ideally, you need a cold frame or unheated greenhouse. But you could also use a well-lit windowsill or a conservatory.
Sweet peas develop long roots soon after germinating. So while they will grow in ordinary pots, long containers result in stronger plants.
You can buy sweet pea Rootrainers and long grow tubes from suppliers such as sarahraven.com and crocus. co.uk. But if you’re thrifty, cardboard loo roll tubes work almost as well.
The containers need to be packed in a tray or a frame which holds them upright.
Use good- quality compost and sow the seeds individually. I use the blunt end of a pencil to push each in gently, about 3cm deep. Make sure the seed is covered.
In a cold frame, a layer of newspaper or fleece over the seeds will give a little extra protection. Remove that when the seedlings are up and growing.
Seedlings sown in late February should be ready to plant out in April.
After planting, sweet peas can be trained as cordons for cut flowers or allowed to grow informally on suitable supports. Cordon sweet peas are easy to look after and, if well managed, provide a constant source of gorgeously fragrant, longstemmed flowers.