This weekend, we had the pleasure of joining my parents at the lovely Lone Pine Gardens in Sebastopol, CA.  Primarily a wholesale nursery, Lone Pine is open to the public Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays.  It's worth a pilgrimage.  The owners are terrifically knowledgeable, and the nursery always has a magnificent selection.  I also like wandering around the growing grounds--and my favorite part is probably the trays full of different kinds of semps.  Seeing one kind of sempervivum en masse is always a treat:

Lone Pine also has some lovely bonsai.  Many of these are traditional-looking bonsai, but the bonsai area also featured these gorgeous, tiny semps in a little dish:

Admittedly, I went seeking some unusual types of crassula, and found nothing on that score this visit.  However, I didn't leave empty-handed!  In an admirable exercise of self-restraint, I took home only three plants:

As some of you have noticed, I've been posting a little less frequently than usual lately--that's because I've been so busy planting!  (Well, and working a lot.)  I thought I'd share a few recent favorites from the past two weekends.

This one occupied several hours.  I took an old basket my girlfriend dug out of the garage and made a sempervivum landscape.  This has at least 20 different varieties of semps and jovibarba, and was a blast to make.  You can't tell from this photo, but I played a lot with height, and made little hills and valleys.  I also used chunks of wood and stone in the landscape.  The final product is about 24-30" x about 14-18".  Click on the pic below for a larger version.

Next up: crassula coccinea (I think), surrounded by a cottony expanse of sempervivum arachnoideum, potted into a shallow square pot from Succulent Gardens.  Here's a birds'-eye view.  The semps become a kind of top dressing themselves.

For some reason, I don't like sanseverias.  I mean, I really dislike them.  To the point where I resent that they're lumped in with the succulents I so dearly love.

Maybe it's because I associate them with office buildings.  Maybe it's because they grace the outside of the law school with which I am associated and I can't help thinking how awesome it would look if there were cool succulent gardens planted there instead of those bleak watery rows of sanseverias.

Truth be told, I don’t even trust people who grow sanseverias.  This is even less rational than my irrational-but-defensible-because-aesthetic-preferences-are-wildly-subjective dislike of sanseverias themselves.  If I’m on eBay trying to decide whether to buy an agave celsii pup or a haworthia truncata seedling or some other little gem and I see that the seller’s other items are mostly sanseverias, I probably won't buy anything from him or her.

I feel guilty, too, for disliking sanseverias.  What did sanseverias ever do to me?  They just sit there plodding out their dull little existences.  It's like disliking twine or gravel or some other bland, innocent object.  Not really worth the effort.  Am I alone in this?