The Cactus Patch. February Panayoti St Paul's Episcopal Church 6:30 PM. Meet the Speaker 5:00 PM Sizzler 900 Real Rd.

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1 The Cactus Patch Opuntia basilaris var. treleasei Volume 20 February 2017 Number 2 THE NEWSLETTER OF THE BAKERSFIELD CACTUS & SUCCULENT SOCIETY This Month's Program Panayoti St Paul's Episcopal Church 6:30 PM Monthly Meeting Amanita phalloides pollypearl@hotmail.com The Bakersfield Cactus & Succulent Society % Polly Hargreaves, editor Looking for succulents in all the wrong places Tuesday, February 14th at 6:30 PM 2017 Dues are payable now! Meet the Speaker 5:00 PM Sizzler 900 Real Rd Dues are payable now! March might be your last issue.

2 The Cactus Patch Volume 20 Number 2 February 2017 The Cactus Patch is the official publication of the Bakersfield Cactus & Succulent Society of Bakersfield, California February 14th MEETING Looking for succulents in all the wrong places Panayoti Kelaidis Membership in the Bakersfield Cactus & Succulent Society costs $20 per year for an individual and $25 a year for a family. CONTACT INF ORMATION President: Paul Bowles corvis797@yahoo.com Membership: Maynard Moe lmmoe44@gmail.com Newsletter: Polly Hargreaves pollypearl@hotmail.com Website: Stephen Cooley thecactuspatch@bak.rr.com Visit Us On the Web! ~2~ Panayoti Kelaidis is a plant explorer, gardener and public garden administrator associated with Denver Botanic Gardens where he is now Senior Curator and Director of Outreach. He has designed plantings for many of the gardens at DBG, he is particularly noted for the plantings of the Rock Alpine Garden. He has introduced hundreds of native ornamentals from throughout the Western United States to general horticulture. He has taken seven collecting trips to Southern Africa researching the high mountain flora there, as well as travels to the Andes, Central Asia (Kazakhstan and Mongolia), the Himalaya (from both Pakistan and China) as well as travels throughout much of Europe from Spain to Turkey and most recently, New Zealand. Many of his plant introductions are available through Plant Select, (a plant introduction program he helped launch along with staff from Colorado State University and nurseries across America). He has lectured in over 140 cities in twelve countries, and has been featured in dozens of television, newspaper and magazine pieces. He has published widely in popular and technical horticultural journals. In recent years Panayoti has been honored with the Boulder History Museum s 60 Year Living History award in 2004, in 2003 by being inducted into the Garden Club of America as Member-at-Large, in 2002 he received the National Garden Clubs Medal of Honor and in 2000 he received the Arthur Hoyt Scott Medal from the Scott Arboretum at Swarthmore College. He has received four awards from the North American Rock Garden Society. In 2004 he was inducted into the Colorado Nursery and Greenhouse Association s Hall of Fame. In 2009 he received the Liberty Hyde Bailey Award of the American Horticultural Society. ~3~

3 January 10, 2017 The Succulent Garden at Cal State Keith Taylor and his wonderful Pots! It takes serious effort to match the personalities of his pots to just the right plant. His plants would make a show on their own. Spring is Here! Too early for Spring you say? Though Spring officially starts on the vernal equinox in March, for plants, Spring starts much earlier. Rapid growth of the 'early' plants usually begins around the third week of January around here. These are mostly weeds like foxtails and mustard but also include many native wildflowers and many ornamental Mediterranean plants. Do you like all the wonderful rain we've been getting. The winter growers in the garden (mesembs and aloes mostly) look fantastic! So do the weeds. We will need to have some weeding workdays to clear them out. Sunday late mornings have been the days we've worked in the past. we can discuss it at the meeting and set a date and time. Keep in mind that rain and threat of rain cancels the workday. What you should bring if you come to work: hand weeding tools, knee-pad, bottled water, maybe a bucket, gloves and be prepared to get dirty, especially if the soil is wet. ~4~ Stephen Cooley ~5~

4 Plant of the Month Aloe bainesii Jack G. Reynolds Continuing with our attempt to inform the membership about succulent plants that may be used in a dry landscape, I have chosen Aloe bainesii. I am using Bob BRAG TABLE Perry s book Landscape Plants for Western Regions as a guide to choices and for Aloe information I have Aloes of the South African Veld by Hans Bornman and David Hardy. These books have been invaluable resources. Aloe bainesii is found in southern Africa from the eastern cape north to Swaziland and Transvaal. It prefers dense brush or low forest. It is the tallest of the Aloes reaching a maximum height of 55 ft. (18 m.). They are slow growing and may require yrs. to reach their maximum. There are perhaps 250 species of Aloe across Africa with many hybrids so if one wants to try some in their yard it should be easy to find a good candidate for your particular situation. The basic growth habit of Aloes is to form a rosette. Tall ones like A. bainesii, will branch as they reach a certain height and each branch will continue as a rosette. Leaves are fleshy, 2-3 ft. ( cm.) long often recurving. There are numerous short stout teeth on the edges of the leaves. Flowers are on branched racemes packed tightly together. They are rose pink to orange, cylindrical about 1.5 in. (35 mm.) long. African sunbirds as well as the unrelated but similar American humming birds like them. Flowers bloom in late winter and early spring. They need well drained soil. In the ground or a raised bed they need a large hole filled with pumice or a mixture of pumice and scoria. Once established they would require little or no water and perhaps some shade in the hottest weather and protection from frost. Bornman and Hardy say they survive 30 F. They can be grown from seed or cuttings. ~6~ Richard Amaya brought a dog pot with an Opuntia brasiliensis. This is actually a tree with a thin trunk and thin flattened pads clustered at the top. The pads sometimes fall off (or can be broken off to start new plants. Polly brought an un-potted Agave americana as an example of the plant of the month. Bruce brought a leafless Euphorbia millotii. It had had flowers and leaves a week before, but lost them when placed outdoors in the rain. Plants from Madagascar can be sensitive. Stephen Cooley brought a beautiful Oxalis gigantea, which is a winter grower. Unfortunately, the leaves close up at night so we didn t get the full beauty. Sidney Kelley brought Jack s Euphorbia poissonii which is growing nicely. Incidentally, the plant is a fish poison and the name stems from the French poisson or fish and not the French poison or poison. ~7~

5 A Very Busy Season A Letter From Bruce In addition to over eating, we had lots of outdoor activity lately. Anne decided to have a shed put in as a sewing room. It is large and tall with windows and a skylight. Unfortunately it has a wall which replaces a bit of the fence between our properties. (The fence needed repair anyway.) This means I had to move plants away from this area and now will have to move them back. Our front yard has had a bit of lawn taken out and I have put in a red bud tree, Euphorbia xanthi and some wild flowers. I have also added five agaves which were freebies at Fresno to an expanded Agave garden. Daniel gave me a bag of rocks for Christmas and I am adding them to the Agaves. At first I thought they were dull gray, but when the dust was washed off of them, they proved to be quite colorful. All of this is aided by the plentiful rain lately. In addition to the flashing star inherited from my mother and a lighted chili wreath, this year we had a string of blue LEDS on the Agave flower stalk. John threw a line up and we bought a string with a solar panel so they don t attach to the house. On Christmas Eve we went to Anne s and had tamales and pozole. Next day we had dinner at Lora s with ham and turkey and all the works. We exchanged presents. It was the usual chaos with too many people, too much food etc. On New Year s Eve we again ate at Anne s and played games. I led the singing at midnight with my clarinet. Sunday we met at Lora s for more food. On Monday we stayed home and watched the Rose Parade. I was pleased to see a lot of the floats had wildlife themes. I particularly liked the flock of Monarch butterflies. ~8~ On the 5th we heard Eunice Thompson speak in Fresno on the Chihuahua Desert. She had a late start due to a medical emergency, but managed to present well. I don t think we needed to see every Agave lecheguilla and she never identified the species on all the Euphorbia xanthii. Otherwise, it was a very interesting tour. On the 6th I noticed a beautiful mushroom in the lawn at Polly s sister Nancy s house. It looked like the death cap Amanita phalloides! th On the 10, of course, we watched Keith Taylor s presentation on Winter Growers. He had fantastic plants and, of course, his homemade pots. There were lots of his pots for sale as well. On the 15th we celebrated Lora s birthday at Tahoe Joe s which was crowded and took a long time. We did better next morning at Denny s which gave Lora a free breakfast. That evening we had cheesy tomato soup at Anne and then went to Lora s for a lesson in painting. None of our works matched the example we were supposed to copy, but there were remarkable outcomes. Anne produced Agaves instead of pine trees and Polly s mountain was a remarkable dome with a waterfall. Instead of a bird, I painted a bat and I added a mushroom and Euphorbia. Finally, I promised some comments on my own experience with succulent landscaping, so here goes. The first garden where I actually planned some sort of organization was in the Peace Corps. While teaching primary school in Malawi I laid out rocks in the shape of the country and filled the area with succulents. Unfortunately they were from the Karoo in South Africa and they all rotted when it rained! Then I tried a garden at the High School where I taught next in the Peace Corps. This time I planted local succulents on a hill-like garden. They were doing fine when I left, but when I returned some time later, they had all been replaced with fruit trees! While at the University of Malawi I scattered succulents in family groups about the campus. I understand this lasted somewhat longer. I was also acting head of the National Herbarium and Botanic Garden nearby in The garden required little work as it was already laid out in a beautiful park-like setting on a well watered hill slope and was being maintained well. I was surprised to find pictures later of the original garden which had been built ninety years earlier. It was a formal English garden! ~9~

6 Next I was in charge oh the Herbarium and Botanic Garden at the National University of Lesotho which was already built and maintained. Due to the high altitude most of the plants were housed in three greenhouses: a half sunken one, a temperate one, and a tropical one. I concentrated on rebuilding the garden outside of them by adding specimens as I collected around the country. From there we moved to Botswana where I had the privilege of building a national botanic garden from scratch. I investigated costs of digging out a central area with ridges around a stream and found the costs outside our budget. The director of the National Museum solved the problem by bringing in the National Dam Building Unit! Everyone kept pestering me to plant roses, but I insisted the garden was for the plants of Botswana. The garden was laid out by ecological regions of Botswana and planting began, leaving as much of the natural vegetation as possible. This was especially true of the rock figs with their roots growing down the large rock outcrops. I left after 6 ½ years and then was asked to come back in 2000 to continue the building. I found someone had put in roses which had died due to the termites which abound in the soil there. (I could have told them the solution- lay down a thick layer of wood ash under thembut why bother?) This second 6 ½ years was full of co-operative projects with other units such as the Millennium Seed Bank connected to Kew Gardens in England. It was a great challenge and I miss the garden in Botswana. I am currently building an Agave garden in our front yard. Why agaves? I started with Agave americana which came from a plant my grandfather had in Stockton and have expanded from there. I am replacing the lawn with a water-wise garden more suitable to Bakersfield. I have, of necessity, been experimenting how to do this as cheaply as possible. I try to get plants and rocks at little or no cost, but this makes the project proceed slowly. Bruce Hargreaves [Bruce's opinions are his own and are not necessarily that of the BCSS] 10~ March 14th BCSS Meeting Woody Minnich The Secrets of Growing Quality Cacti and Succulents April 11th BCSS Meeting Rob McGregor JUN 30--JUL 2 CSSA ANNUAL SHOW AND SALE HUNTINGTON BOTANICAL GARDENS JULY CSSA CONVENTION, TEMPE, AZ. SEPT. 2 SUCCULENT SYMPOSIUM HUNTINGTON BOTANICAL GARDENS Visit us on the Web! Facebook: ~11~