What the Succulent?

What the Succulent?

Today we are at the end of January, which means that in a few days I will have completed a full year of California residency, spending the vast majority of my days on this hilltop, with clear views to the ocean and mountains alike. As I sit in the living room I see verdant gardens to my left and dry hillside chaparral to my right. The sun is streaming in and we are planning our escape from the premises for the morning, which is our habit on cleaning day when we are invaded by the Mexican horde of young women who are trained to scrub every inch of our home. Yesterday and today I have a favorite Hispanic (I hesitate to call him Mexican despite his heritage because I believe he is a Dreamer who was brought here as a very young boy) named Victor, who speaks excellent English and who hires out for day work. I had him take care of several things. I have him burying three lengths of low voltage cable for my back hillside outdoor lighting. I have him planting about 25 ornamental grasses at the base of Senor Buffalo, I have him disposing (as in throwing over the cliff) the cut up Agave Americana trunk and branches I cut up the other day, and I have him planting several of the yucca stems I pruned off the lower yucca tree.

For Christmas, my oldest son, Roger, sent me a t-shirt with a few cacti depicted and the expression “What the Succulent?” on it. Or at least that’s what I read it to say. I wore the shirt yesterday and discovered that it really reads, “What the Fucculent?” It makes a statement either way and it does a good job of summing up a big part of my retirement lifestyle since I spend most days doing something or other in the dirt around succulent plants. It is somehow funny that succulents, which are defined as plants with parts that are thickened, fleshy and engorged, usually to retain water in arid climates or soil conditions, abound here in San Diego. When most people think of San Diego versus somewhere like Phoenix, they think of a warm and moderately humid climate. It is not tropically humid like say Belize and the Mosquito Coast, but it is not hot and dry like most of Arizona. The truth is that San Diego County is vast and the microclimates range from very humid to very arid. Generally the areas closest to the coast are temperate and moist and the parts inland are dry and about ten degrees of so hotter. It is decidedly not like Cabo San Lucas in Baja where the desert meets the sea. There is plenty of desert in the County, but it is far from the sea and much closer to the mountains.

You will notice that I often describe my views from this hilltop as comprising an ocean view to the West and a Mountain View to the East. We fall somewhere in between the two extreme climates represented in the array. We are part verdant and part arid and, indeed, the front slope facing East is deeply planted in an amazing array of specimen succulents and cacti where the back slope that faces West is sparse and dry with occasional cacti and succulents and wispy grasses here and there. My front yard is well watered with about nineteen irrigation zones which I control with a watering app. The back has just two zones and I need to add one now for the Bison Boulder grasses. While I have all this supplemental irrigation in place, the succulent population has not gotten that memo and still stores abundant water in its leaves and stems to allow it to survive the dry spells.

I recently wrote about my exercise in pruning my yucca succulent tree in the back to match the well-pruned look they have in the front of the house. When I did that I ended up with several large yucca stems and one good You-Tube later I have decided that I need to plant the three best yucca stalks. I have had Victor sink two of them on the hillside behind the garage and one on the back hillside on the North side of the house where the land is pretty bare otherwise. They say that with minimal effort and attention, these yucca cuttings will root by themselves and flourish. This is my experiment in doing that. These are large stems that would probably cost $50 or so if purchased at the local nursery. I tried to propagate several aloe stems last spring, but did so by putting them in a bucket of water. They did not seem to appreciate that approach and nothing ever came of the effort. I’m expecting better things from these yuccas and will trim off some of the lower leaves to give the young offshoots the best chance of both looking good and staying focused on new growth. We’ll see what becomes of it.

We used to have three planters with succulents on the deck. When the renovation work began we moved them to the Juliet balcony off the master bedroom to complement the eagle statue. They have prospered out there and we are inclined to leave them since the planters are right-sized for that balcony. As of right now we have only metal sculpture succulents for the deck as well as a real Bonsai or two. Once we have finished with the deck renovation we will see how the replacement furnishing of the new deck suits us as far as adding more live succulents to the picture. I’m less inclined to overdo it since it requires special watering chores (not so often for drought-tolerant plants), but more because we have succulents everywhere we look around this property and it seems less necessary to supplement the landscape with planted hardscape.

I have decided that I like succulents. Their varieties are plentiful and there are those that are soft and gentle and those that are prickly and course. They all do a fine job of storing water in their leaves and stalks and take full advantage of the occasional but hard rains we have here, so as to better handle the long dry spells in between. I like adaptive examples of nature. I like plants and animals that can function alone in the vastness and are indifferent to climate. As we see Joe Biden trying to correct all the abuse that our environmental standards underwent during the Trump Administration, and we see climate change getting addressed once again, I am reminded that long after Donald Trump and even his offspring are dead and gone from this earth, there will still be succulents sprouting from rock crevices and hillside on this chaparral and they will do so just fine regardless of what we tend to do or not do from a regulatory standpoint. While some individual varieties might suffer at the hands of ill-established regulations, mostly, it is mankind that suffers most at its own hands. We are the fragile ones with limited tolerance for heat or cold, wet or dry. They say that honey badger don’t care, but the honey badger is a fragile little flower compared to the hardy and impervious succulent and never blinks an eye every time man thinks he can control it on his little hilltop. When climate change puts the final nail into mankinds’ coffin, we will be forced to look at the landscape and say once again, “what the succulent?”