#SOL18 3-23-18 Succulents are a Slippery Slope, or In Which I Succ-umb to ISM

When I was a kid and we lived in Phoenix for a while, my dad did a lot of succulent gardening. We had several of those soft cover Sunset books they often sell at hardware stores about different gardening topics. Ours were on succulents. We spent a lot of time together at the hardware store and the nursery, when we weren't at the river. The heady smell of fertilizer still makes me giddy with longing to have my hands in dirt.

My White Elephant cactus, post fake-flower removal.

My favorite of the glossy magazine-like books featured succulents planted in nontraditional containers: broken pottery, toilets, old boots, rusty birdcages, animal shaped pots, wagons, filling the beds of rusted out pick-up trucks, spilling out of strawberry pots. I loved imagining creative places to plant succulents. Although we never found one, my deepest desire was to have a discarded toilet to fill with succulents. Just think, you could plant succulents both in the bowl and in the tank, once you removed the lid! In my mind's eye I could just see the toilet sitting in our gated brick courtyard, donkey's tail trailing out of the tank and string of pearls spilling out of the bowl.

I hadn't thought about succulents for years when I won a little cactus as part of a white elephant gift bag at an President's Day weekend book exchange. The poor little thing had a fake flower glued on.  Months later, after I removed the flower, it started to grow. Curious about what type of cactus it might be, I started searching Instagram. That's when I learned about International Succulent Mania (ISM). Instagram is heaven for succulent lovers; there are posts from Asia, Europe, and many, many from California, where succulents thrive outdoors. ISM sports dozens of hashtags including #succulove, #succulentaddict, #succulentbabies, and of course, #succulentsofinstagram.

At my local nursery, Maria works inside the greenhouse. She's about the age my dad would be, had he not been taken too early. Maria is naturally beautiful with short and shiny silver hair, skin brown and deeply creased from years in the sun, and the energetic walk of a gardener. When I went to visit, Maria and I had a long conversation about the horrifying news that in a stunt to woo Amazon, Arizona's economic development group delivered a mature saguaro cactus to their headquarters in Seattle, which Amazon refused to accept. This is extreme trauma for a plant which can live 200 years, but it did finally get a happy ending, as it was then donated to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson. As Maria and I chatted and looked over the nursery's collection of succulents, she provided lessons on each.

I told myself having a class plant (or two) would be almost as good as having a class pet. Once I told my students about how I had unintentionally beheaded the cactus just carrying it into the school, they were extraordinarily gentle with them. We lost a few before we learned not to overwater, but they've been happy there overall. The trouble is once I had succulents at school, home felt lonely. So back to visit Maria I went.

     The next step down this slippery slope into ISM was when my donkey's tail spontaneously had pups, the adorable name for equally adorable succulent babies. They appeared underneath. I watched, amazed, as they developed over months. Then one Saturday I decided it was time to replant. Once I carefully removed them from beneath their mother's protective leaves I had second thoughts. They were so incredibly tiny, but adorable and so green...for a couple of weeks... until one by one they began to fail. My husband was sure I had under-watered them. At the nursery Maria told me most die from overwatering. "Don't love them to death," she warned me.

I decided that using regular potting soil had probably been my downfall, so I ordered a a special succulent & cactus mix from Amazon. And some succulent fertilizer to encourage growth. And at Target, after I found someone to water the succulents drying up way back in the corner of the store, I found a tiny mister to take home. So after I go to visit Maria tomorrow, I'm going to give propagation another shot. I'll let you know how it turns out.

The cactus that started it all, now thriving at school.