My honey, Kevin Smith, is a skilled woodworker, builder, and artist. One of his pieces that has attracted a lot of attention is this wall sculpture. It’s assembled from foraged organic materials and reclaimed scrap, and it’s a habitat-in-waiting for bees, birds, and other native animals. The patterns of holes and partitions allows many different species of small animals to inhabit the sculpture, whether it’s mounted on an apartment terrace 16 stories above the street or next to a backyard patio. Inspired by the Urban Hedgerow campaign, Kevin interprets the invitation to urban wilderness in a really beautiful way, one that seduces us into contemplating how much wild nature we want to interact with in our human-centered habitat. Kevin has made several of these pieces for our customers. If you’d like to contact him about building one for you, email us at buyers@floragrubb.com. If you’d like more information about the Urban Hedgerow campaign, go to http://urbanhedgerow.com/.

We have a big load of special aeoniums in the store right now. These Canary Island succulent treelets are peerless in their ease of care and graphic impact in the garden.

The cultivar Zwartkop, meaning “black head” in Dutch, bears deep-purple-red leaves that in full flush start out apple-green. As winter ages into spring, larger plants will develop cones of acid-yellow flowers out of the centers of the crowns for a long-lasting show. Below you can see the background plant beginning to develop conical flowerheads.

One of the gratifying features of aeoniums is that they grow during the winter rainy season. This year’s been rather dry, but just a little bit of irrigation keeps them bustling along, expanding the disc of their leaves and developing the charming mini-tree look that works so well in containers and small-scale gardens.

Few plants are easier to care for in mostly frost-free climates of California. In cool-summer zones, water them occasionally in summer to keep them lush. You can leave them almost completely dry if you’re nerdily enchanted (as we are) by their crowns’ cyclical shrinkage down to silver-dollar-size discs. The cliffs of Telegraph Hill are peppered with aeoniums left completely to the whims of rain: from summer to winter they change dramatically.

Beachside, they’re prime, but they’re also at home in brighter woodsy gardens, too. Plant them in sun or shade, in soil that drains well, and watch them expand, grow, and bloom. Like most succulents, they’re easy to root from cuttings and they’ll persist in a container indefinitely. Many of our Succulent Ornaments use aeonium cuttings and are a great way to start your own aeonium plant.

Hard frosts will damage or kill aeoniums, but if enough mass remains on your plant, it can sometimes regrow. If your garden gets a lo of frost, grow them in pots and move them into protected spots or cover with frost cloth on cold nights. Frost cloth can help protect from the hail that can pock-mark the leaves; you’ll be surprised how fast they grow out of the damage. If your tastes tend toward neatness, cut off or groom the spent flowerstalks — they will sometimes branch out after blooming. Slugs and snails can nibble aeoniums but generally pose minor problems. Lightly rooting, especially in the dry season, they sometimes need staking.

Our current stock of specimens is a seasonal treat, not always available. Year-round we keep in stock a wide array in containers ranging from two-inch to seven-gallon-size. Some types, like Aeonium canariense, are big, low, glossy and green, and others, like Aeonium haworthii, make colonies of small intricate crowns. Hybridizers frequently introduce delicious new variations.

What a Lineup This Year!

We’ve worked really hard to bring in an adorable collection of Christmas tree ornaments this year. Come into to the store and pick up a house gift for a party or something for your own holiday tree!

Creatures of All Kinds

The array this year includes peacocks, owls, giraffes, whales, and even octopus. Each is lovable in its unique way–but they don’t need a college fund.

 

 

 

We’re selling them pretty quickly, so best come in soon to get the best selection.

The Aerium Is Inspired by the Terrarium

We created the name “Aerium” to describe a living plant world enclosed in glass (normally called a terrarium) that contains no “terra,” the Latin word for earth.

An Aerium contains tillandsias, plants that in nature grow without soil (usually on the branches of trees). That’s why tillandsias are known as air plants. Thus, “Aerium” is their miniature world. We sell them both in the nursery at in our Web Shop.

Tillandsias are part of the bromeliad family. Tillandsias are bromeliads, but not all bromeliads are tillandsias. For example pineapples are bromeliads but are not tillandsias.

They can be found growing wild in the forests, mountains, and deserts of Central and South America, Mexico, the Caribbean, and the southern United States. Most are tender plants and don’t like cold weather.

Aerium Care
Aeriums do best when they are kept at a mild temperature–not too hot, and not too cold. They thrive in bright areas, but not in direct sunlight.

Mist your Aerium with water once every two weeks (weekly during hot or dry periods) using a spray bottle. It is not necessary to soak the tillandsia. Focus the nozzle through the hole in the Aerium and spritz lightly. The nozzle doesn’t actually have to fit through the hole — only the spritzed water. Take care not to leave standing water inside the Aerium. Tillandsias do not like standing water, and may rot or wither if they are exposed to too much moisture. Allow the Aerium to dry fully before watering again.

To clear water droplets off the inside surface of the glass, try using a cotton swab. To rearrange the natural elements, use a pencil or long-handled tweezers.

When it’s mature and thriving, your tillandsia might flower! In optimal conditions its lifespan can be decades long, depending on the species.

Our Aerium Bar
If you’d like to make your own Aerium, we’re setting we have a DIY station here in the nursery where you can come in and select from natural materials we’ve gathered for you to create your own Aerium composition. It’s open every day, a new permanent fixture here, because people have been having so much fun making their own Aeriums! It will be open Saturday, December 3 through Saturday, December 24, 2011. You can also buy pre-made Aeriums in our Web Shop. We are always happy to help you here in the store with any questions you might have about Aeriums and tillandsias.

 

One of the most exciting events we held this year was a September book talk and demonstration by Rebecca Burgess, author of Harvesting Color. It was so popular and her presentation so eye-opening, that we’ve invited Rebecca to return to the nursery on Sunday, December 4, at 11am.

An accomplished artisan, Rebecca focuses on the life of fiber, dye, and fabric in our human ecology. She compassionately teaches us how to draw upon local riches to create gorgeous garments. Harvesting Color is both a beautifully accessible guidebook to creating your own dyes and fiber from local materials, and an enchanting argument for living within our “fibershed.” The book is a marvelous gift for people interested in craft, plants, clothing, and human ecology.

That term — fibershed — means the geographic range from which one’s fiber, dye, and fabrics are drawn and fabricated. It’s a notion like watershed or foodshed: the region through which our essential and potentially renewable resource cycles.

Our watershed and the water cycle within it are usually traceable. In the case of San Francisco, our municipal water comes from Yosemite National Park though an aqueduct to reservoirs in San Mateo County. Meanwhile, the watershed we actually inhabit, drained by the city’s creeks and lakes into the bay and ocean, persists amid pavement and parkland, and receives the effluent of our imported water and sewage treatment process.

Just as San Franciscans (and the vast majority of Westerners) subsist on imported water, so do almost all of us in industrial society clothe ourselves in imported fiber and dye. Costs aside, by drawing on locally sourced fabric constituents, we can attend to the very specific beauty of our own Bay Area habitat. We can make and wear that beauty!

We’re at a fascinating, even dramatic, moment in the flow of ideas about how our first-world societies are evolving. The fate of the earth, the direction of change, the risks of complacency — they’re all up for fervent discussion right now. Rebecca Burgess makes a wise and moving contribution to that discussion.

Please come hear Rebecca Burgess discuss her work and ideas on Sunday.

No one forgets a gift you made yourself. And everyone can keep a succulent growing. What better gift than something you made with succulents?

 

That’s why we’re offering up our garden design specialist, Patrick Lannan, to give you a demonstration of the some of things you can create using succulents. It would take him all day to cover all the ways  to get creative with succulents (we’ve only got about an hour for his talk), but the possibilities include dish gardens, branch sculptures, vertical gardens, terrariums, and flower arrangements.

Not just a boffo garden designer, Patrick is also an amazing watercolor artist (check out his beautiful cards in the store), gourmet cook, and floral designer. He’s offering his demonstration during our Thanksgiving Open House on Sunday, November 27, at 11am, and on Saturday, December 11, at 11am. It’s a great opportunity to get inspired to make some beautiful, durable, and easy-to-care-for gifts at home.

 

We often call them “forever flowers” around here because they’ll stay lovely for weeks or months after cutting. The bouquet above can easily generate a new planting that will bring your gift recipient a whole new phase of appreciation.

Our friends at MAC, the chic shop in the Yellow Building in the Dogpatch, have had such fun admiring the succulent branch Patrick created for their front window using rhipsalis, a tiny jungle cactus. Something about incorporating succulents and tillandsia air plants into a lichen- and moss-encrusted branch turns these naturally beautiful woodland artifacts into magical gardens, each like a living architectural model of an aerie in the jungle. Patrick will show you how to make your own.

 

Succulents are among the best plants for terrariums, because they hold up so well over time, feature fascinating detail, and effect delightful sleights of scale for that landscape-in-a-bottle feeling.

 

 

Planting succulent compositions allows you to create miniature landscapes with the air of bonsai but without bonsai’s intricacies of care. It takes time to get these right, but it’s a really fun process of figuring how to combine varied textures, scales, and colors.

 

For the patient, growing a succulent vertical garden allows you to create your own painterly designs that you can watch grow and change over time, like a happier version of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Much happier.

 

I’m hoping this gallery of succulent craft inspires you to make something for yourself or a loved one. Come get some inspiration here at the nursery!

Tillandsias are such fun to play with. What are they? Tillandsias are air plants. They grow on trees, not in soil, so they can actually hang out and green up places that other plants can’t. There are tons of ways to use them — for prettying up corners of your apartment, sharing living beauty with loved ones, or just opening up your creative imagination.

Our colleague Zenaida Sengo knows all about tillandsias, and will be offering a demonstration of ways to use them on Friday, November 25, at 11am, Saturday, November 26, at 1pm, and on Sunday, December 11, at 11am. Come visit and learn more about about these marvelous members of the pineapple family and what you can do with them.

Our latest invention for using tillandsias is Thigmotrope Satellite, a tool that you can mount on your wall that cradles the plants and makes it easy to care for them. Place them in whatever pattern pleases you to create a unique vertical garden. Zenaida will have some great ideas to share, I’m sure.

We’re having a discussion about local manufacturing this upcoming Saturday that I hope you’ll join.

Two of our new holiday garden inventions are made in the Bay Area, one just across the Bay in Alameda, the other here in San Francisco. We’re psyched that we are fulfilling our goal of local production and we’re excited to talk about the ins and outs of developing these cool little garden-decor tools, Thigmotrope Satellite and our Succulent Ornament. We feel strongly that making things close to home fortifies our communities.

My friends and collaborators Seth Boor, Sascha Retailleau, Julia Turner, and I will tell our stories of working together and of the larger issues involved in manufacturing things close at hand. We also want to hear about other folks’ experiences in making and sourcing things locally. The process of bringing an idea through manufacturing to market can seem mysterious, and there’s lots to tell.

Seth and his partner in Boor Bridges Architecture, Bonnie Bridges, designed our nursery for us and we’ve collaborated on lots of other projects. Seth and I came up with a way to create a low-fuss air-plant vertical garden for the Bardessono Hotel in Napa that we called a “thigmotrope.” Our installation there generated lots of requests for a DIY option. Well, Thigmotrope Satellite is that DIY tool we have created for making custom vertical gardens with tillandsias (air plants).

 

We turned to Sascha to help us develop the product and he made sure to find a local fabricator, Joel Hirschfeld. Sascha’s got a wealth of experience in product development with tons of information and stories to share. A great source of support for and information about local manufacturing is SF Made.

 

 

While both products are small metal implements, their development went down two different paths. Thigmotrope Satellite is cool-looking piece of hardware designed to screw into a wall; the Succulent Ornament is a pretty holiday ornament that hangs lightly on a tree. For the latter we sought out Julia because her jewelry expertise meshed perfectly with the delicacy of the ornament.

The Succulent Ornament draws upon both the jewel-like qualities of succulent cuttings, and their hardiness (they stay looking good — without roots — for a month or more). My collaboration with Julia, a marvelous jewelry designer, resulted in the beautiful hardware that she and her team hand-make  here in San Francisco.

As a small independent business, making things close to home matters to us,  because we’re supporting innovative local businesses that treat their employees with respect and pay them a living wage. And by sourcing local products we’re using a little less fuel to transport merchandise to our store. I hope that you’ll join us for this conversation after Thanksgiving and if you can’t make it, please consider paying us a visit for your holiday shopping to see these new Bay Area products.

Our vertical succulent gardens bring visitors to the nursery a sense of wonder, and many people are inspired to build and grow their own at home.

We offer for sale here in the store and in our Web Shop the same type of panel we use to create our own vertical succulent gardens. It’s a gratifying project to do it yourself, but you might want instructions, which we offer below.

Hang the panels outdoors

While some succulents are capable of growing indoors, they do much better when they enjoy the sun and air circulation of the outdoors. The panels are built with slotted cells that allow the water to trickle from cell to cell and drain out the bottom, making them unsuitable for placing against sheetrock or other indoor wall surfaces. Drainage out the bottom poses a problem for indoor flooring as well.

How they are made

The DIY Vertical Panels are made of food-safe HDPE, which is the same plastic used to make milk jugs. The plastic is flexible yet firm. Each panel will weigh approximately 50-70 when planted. The walls of the planting compartments are slanted downward to keep soil from falling out. Each compartment has slots that allow water to drain through from one cell to the next. See the image below.

Planting the panels

The panels can be planted in two ways: plug-in planting and homegrown.

1) Plug-in planting

Each compartment will hold two succulents from 2-inch containers. One panel takes 90 plants to fill, and gives you speedy (but not instant) gratification. Allow the succulents to grow into the panel by maintaining it on a flat surface for a month (spring through fall) or longer (winter). In winter, take care to protect the garden panel from periods of freezing temperatures. Anytime the panel is being cultivated horizontally, protect from rain and hail.

After a month or so, you can mount the panel in its permanent, vertical position.

2) Homegrown

For a more economical and do-it-yourself approach, the panels can be filled with loose potting soil while they are lying flat. You can insert cuttings of succulents from your own collection in a pattern of your choosing. Be sure to keep the panels flat (and out of the rain!) for three to five months, in order to allow them to root in. You don’t want all your hard work to pour out when you hang it up! Many succulents grow more actively in the warmer part of the year.

If you can pick them up here at our nursery, we can offer pre-planted, established vertical succulent panels by special order only. Unfortunately, we do not offer this product in our Web Shop, cannot accommodate requests for custom designs, and we cannot ship. Orders for pre-planted panels require a wait of between one and three weeks if they are available; availability is limited to pre-planted panels on hand at our growers.

Hanging them up

The panels measure 20” x 20” and extend 2 ½” from the wall. They come with a metal mounting bracket that screws into the wall horizontally. The panel can be hung from this bracket and is easily removable for watering and maintenance. Alternately, each panel has a pair of slots allowing you to insert screws through the panel and directly onto the backing. This can be useful for a more permanent mounting. The panels can weigh anywhere from 50 to 70 pounds when fully planted and watered. It is important to mount the panels to structural beams capable of holding the considerable weight of water-saturated soil and plants.

Watering and maintaining the panels

The panels can be watered by hand or by a drip system. The top of each tray has a little channel that perfectly fits a 1/4″ drip irrigation line. The slotted cells allow the water to flow from cell to cell and drain out the bottom. At Flora Grubb Gardens we water by hand since we can so easily reach them. We use a low-pressure spray and slowly wet the garden for a few minutes. Then we wait five minutes and repeat. We’ll do it one more time if it’s been particularly warm for a couple of weeks. We don’t water it at all if there’s been rain within the previous week.

How to create an installation with the panels

Flora Grubb Gardens does not create custom installations using the DIY Vertical Panel. Our installation here at the nursery was done by a contractor who started with a panel of MDO (marine plywood) as backing. He then mounted it with French cleats (included with each vertical panel) – a common construction method to “float” the garden off the wall with an air space behind it for ventilation. The frame on our own vertical garden was created by mounting the wood frame (redwood, driftwood, etc.) directly to the back panel of plywood after the panels were mounted. Use your imagination!

Customizing and modifying the panels

The panel can be cut with a proper saw blade, but should be cut before planting along the lines of the little compartments to make sure all the soil will stay contained. Panels can be configured to create displays of any size, though it is important to consider the feasibility of care and maintenance for such a non-traditional garden.

We’ve just posted all of the events we have scheduled for our Thanksgiving Open House weekend. Lots of opportunities to learn and get inspired. Great new ideas for indoor gardening and DIY green gift ideas. Hope you’ll join us for a class or two, and bring a friend!