TOP VARIETIES TO GROW

ECHEVERIA ELEGANS

I love E. elegans with its clean, bright, silverygreen leaves and coral flowers. The flowers dry, but keep their shape, turning a beautiful rust as they age and look good for four or five months above the soft grey rosettes. And there is – honestly – nothing easier to grow. One rosette quickly bulks up and makes more to fill a shallow terracotta tray, gradually spilling out from the centre to pour over the pot’s edge like a slow-motion lava eruption.

ECHEVERIA LILACINA

New to us this year is the even brighter silver,

E. lilacina, which seems made for Christmas. I want to outline its leaves with mini fairy lights and turn it into a table centre UFO.

ECHEVERIA SHAVIANA

This year we’ve also grown the crinkly, curvyedged E. shaviana, which is silver with a pink flush, rather more like seaweed that has been crossed with sea anemone than succulent, and lovely with it.

‘BLUE PRINCE’

I love the cool of ‘Blue Prince’, with grey-green leaves with a frilly coral edge, glaucous in the middle and almost pewter coloured in the outside leaves.

‘BLACK PRINCE’

This is as it sounds, dark, glossy-leaved and the richest coloured variety. An apparent free-flowerer, it reminds me of a supercharged houseleek.

‘DUCHESS OF NUREMBERG’

To vary the colour, but continue the shape in a mixed echeveria container, we’ve fallen for the pink-bronze flushed, ‘Duchess of

Nuremberg’. I’ve loved it in a pot with E. elegans and E. lilacina and it is still looking good in my bathroom and sitting room, three rosettes crammed into a shallow tray.