Various Types of Succulents and How to Identify Them

Hello! Welcome to Dawson’s Garden World! I’m Bev and I’m Rachel. Today we’re going to show you some of the succulents that we grow in our production nursery and some of the succulents that we’ve got in display gardens around the nursery.

Various Types of Succulents Identified

This one is Crassula Bluebird, beautiful foliage filler plant grows to about 70 centimeters to a meter high. It’s very dense growth with this beautiful red edge on the leaf. It’s very very tough plant. This plant will pretty much grow with really no water at all over the summer.

This is the Aeonium Tricolor. It grows about 40 centimeters and it’s a wonderful plant for the garden with its awesome change of color. The tips of the leaves grow a beautiful rosette pink color and amongst other succulents it is absolute fantastic.

This is the Blue Kalanchoe [Kalanchoe Fedtschenkoi]. As you can see it’s a beautiful mounding plant and it will flower during the winter and the flowers sit up above the plant. And it’s very high in nectar so the honey eaters absolutely adore these flowers. You can start to see the flowers are just starting to work their way out of the tops of the plant now and it has this beautiful blue-gray foliage the rest of the year. A really fantastic filler as well and just incredibly tough and hardy in the garden.

This is the Gold Sedum [Sedum Adolphi] which is actually one of my favorite succulents. I’ve got it growing at home cascading over a gabion wall. It’s a wonderful trailer and gives vibrant color especially over winter when the color gets more orange.

Crassula  Ovata is another golden oldie that’s making a fantastic comeback. If you go around the older suburbs or Perth you’ll see wonderful mounted shrubs of them and flag this time of the year with absolute balls of pink flowers. It is a really truly and beautiful addition to the garden.

This is the Delosperma Sunflare. This is a new release for us this year. It was featured in the West Australian gardening section earlier in the year, beautiful for continuous flowering ground cover. You could expect anything up to about a meter spread on the Delosperma. I really want one of those plants. That is just fantastic prolific flowering over a very long period of time.

This is Kalanchoe Quicksilver another a silver colored foliage plant and it grows to about 20 to 30 centimeters but the foliage turns a beautiful shade of pink in autumn and you get beautiful pink flowers in winter.

This is the Portulaca Variegata. It’s a variegated jade plant. Probably as opposed to the normal jade plant you’d be familiar with this one is a lot more of a cascading sort of habit. So in addition to the beautiful variegated and the red stems it has more of a trailing habit as opposed to upright. Beautiful filler for the garden and just as hardy as the original jade plant.

Dawson’s has revived the Zygo Cactus straight from the 70s. This fantastic hardy flowering winter flowering plants are available at Dawson’s. Now all stores have 130 milk pot you can see there for 9.95. Each pot has 3 individual plants in it so you get a nice bushy shrub very very quickly.

Okay so now we’re going to demonstrate planting up a display bowl which has become quite trendy with with our succulents. So you’re looking for different form and texture and color and just balancing so that it’s pleasing to the eye. Okay so here we’ve made a bit of a selection of plants and place them roughly where we think that they should go. This is probably this is fairly densely planted. You could obviously space your plants out a little bit more and they will grow quite quickly into their spot as well but we’re after an instant effect here so this is why we’ve probably put a few more plants in there then maybe you might do at home.

We’ve just finished planting this pot and doesn’t it look absolutely stunning the colors and the textures are to die for. We’ve left it just with the bare soil but I’m going to show you in a moment how you can give it a bit of pizzazz by adding coconut fiber around it or you could even use pebbles or different pea gravels. There’s so much you can do but what a wonderful show it makes. This is a completed pot using loose coconut fiber it gives us a totally different look and finishes it off beautifully.

Dawson’s has a large selection of already potted gift containers and we have lots of pots that are beautifully colored and designed to have your succulents in. We also do gift wrapping at our Dawson’s stores as well.

The creative opportunities with succulents are absolutely endless. Here we’ve planted up an old bicycle with a couple of succulents and my very favorite is a rustic pig which we’ve planted that but it’s very easy. You can purchase all sorts of metal animals and all you do is get a hanging basket and you heat it up put it in the center and punch your holes around the edge and that’s the end result. And there are so many different things you can do it is quite exciting.

Move over geraniums. For window boxes we’ve got a fantastic alternative rather use succulents. You’ve got the texture the color – they are so hardy and once you’ve planted them they will last for many many years.

Just to finish off we’d like to thank you for watching our succulent plant display talk are all of our plants are seasonally available. So just check with your local store or at our website for details and thank you.

Happy gardening!