DryStoneGarden

Sedum spathulifolium

Our Sedum spathulifolium (stonecrop) has started blooming. I like the flower buds better than the flowers, which are a bit too mustardy for my taste.

Sedum spathulifolium

In our garden we have it in containers. I keep accidentally knocking off little pieces of it, which I then put in potting soil to root and make new plants. I now have six little sedums in thimble pots and stubbies, a couple of which are preparing to bloom. We planted spathulifolium in a couple of gardens last year, but we tend to reserve for extreme sites where it takes a while to establish and spread, so the plants aren’t really photo worthy yet.

Sedum spathulifolium

The Fleming garden has the best planting of it that I’ve seen, cascading down the slope between the rocks. It can be hard to get plants to survive, let alone thrive, on a slope that steep, but the spathulifolium clearly likes the extreme exposure; easy to see why it’s one of the main California natives that appears on green roof plant lists, like the one for the Academy of Sciences Building. I have several more photos from the Fleming garden below. I wish I’d been there when the light had been more amenable to photos, but I don’t see a way to fix that, other than to wait for our own slope-planted plants to spread so I can photograph them at the optimum hours of the day. (more…)