Succulents and More™

Hoover Boo’s Piece of Eden was one of the first garden blogs I started to follow, and it’s still one of my favorite sources of inspiration. Hoover Boo faithfully documents the continuing evolution of her ½ acre garden in the benign climate of Orange County, California, about 15 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean. Winter temperatures rarely drop into the 30s, and summer highs rarely exceed the high 80s. This allows her to grow pretty much anything she likes—from roses to bromeliads to aloes and agaves, as well as a multitude of southern-hemisphere shrubs like grevilleas, leucadendrons and leucospermums. Hoover Boo and I have become friends over the years, and since she lives close to where my younger daughter goes to university, I’ve had the opportunity to visit her Piece of Eden on multiple occasions. I stopped by earlier this week to deliver a couple of echinopsis hybrids I’d removed from my front yard last year to make room for this Echinopsis ‘June Noon’ . Many California gardens b