September Walking Tour – Noticing the Succulents of the Steppe Garden

Succulents are incredible creatures. Their fleshy, spheroidal, animalistic forms reach to us. They are hairy, waxy, spiny, thick, weird and familiar. The same adaptations that make them champion survivors also attract us. These creature features break our tendency toward plant blindness through a dimensionality and existence in space that we understand. We judge them as separate from their floral brethren and honor them as other beings.

Plants with succulent adaptations occur all across the planet Earth, and steppe regions are no exception. The Steppe Garden is particularly rich in succulent life forms, and they’re easy to spot and commune with if you know how to notice them.
 

• Begin your exploration by walking through the Shady Lane entrance on the northern side of the Steppe Garden and veer to the left. These crescent moon-shaped beds are part of our South African steppe collections. Take the gravel path and look down. You’ll notice Delosperma nubigenum and Crassula peploides, two very different succulents growing among the stones. Circle around the bed to get a clear view of our crevice garden. Here, you’ll find Cotyledon orbiculata, Euphorbia clavarioides and Ruschia putterillii, each adapted to the harsh conditions of the southern African steppe in its own peculiar way.
• Continue south into the North American section of the Steppe Garden. Here you’ll find several succulents that are particularly important to the North American steppe, including the ball cactus, Escobaria vivipara; the banana-leaved yucca, Yucca baccata; and the Colorado state cactus, Echinocereus triglochidiatus.
• Now, walk across the bridge to Patagonia. Just through the entrance, on the southwestern face of the large stone formation, notice a pot full of different species of cacti that occur in the Patagonian steppe but aren’t cold-hardy enough for us to grow outside. Just behind that pot, you can inspect a crevice garden built for several species of Patagonian cacti, notably Gymnocalycium gibbosum and several different species of Austrocactus.
• After leaving Patagonia, return to the center of the Steppe Garden and find the Central Asian Steppe beds. Here, a wide variety of Sedum, Rosularia, and Orostachys grow through and hide among the rocks. These plants can be easy to overlook, but slow down and look closely. Many will reveal themselves through their large, often spectacular flower heads rising above the rocks and surrounding vegetation.
• Approach the final planter, known as the living stones bed, and prepare yourself for a succulent explosion. Surrounding the planting bed is a collection of pots filled with South African succulent specimens that have to be brought into our greenhouses during the winter. The planting bed itself is full of succulents in the plant family Aizoaceae. These plants, commonly known as living stones and perhaps most famously represented by the genus Lithops, have adaptations of color and form that help them avoid predation by blending into their surroundings. Look for Delosperma, Aloinopsis, Ruschia, Crassothonna and Lithops among the collection. There are several dozen species of living stones and other succulents in this bed, so be sure to slow down and really explore the space.