WICHITA, Kan. — If you’re one of those people who worry about whether the younger generation is getting into gardening, Lauren Spencer will give you hope.
Spencer, about to start her sophomore year at Newman University, was among the people — many of them young — who swamped Dutch’s Greenhouse in the spring when it had seminars on succulents. Spencer bought a string of pearls and a donkey’s tail and variety of little sedums. When she traveled to San Francisco a few weeks ago, she swooned at succulents spilling alongside the highways, bought a rubber tree plant at Succulence and then fretted over it until she got it safely home.
The 19-year-old now dotes on the plants and propagates them in the walk-out basement of her parents’ house in west Wichita.
She’d get more but she’s run out of room.
“When I was younger, I had a lot of pets, a crazy amount of pets — guinea pigs, rabbits, birds, chickens, two or three dogs, cats — a ridiculous amount of pets. A hamster. I had a chameleon. A month later I would get overwhelmed, and my parents would have to take care of them,” Spencer said.
She feels like the thick-leafed succulents somehow take their place.
“I see these as pets that are much easier and lower stakes.”
Succulents’ compact size, variety of textures, colors and forms, and their ease of care make them downright collectible.
Succulents cover a broad range of plants, including aloe, sedum, kalanchoe, agave, echeveria, euphorbia, sempervivum, aeonium, cotyledon.
“In the last three years they’ve exploded,” Jim Denning of Denning’s Greenhouse said right before the greenhouse closed for the growing season last week. “We were into succulents for the last six or seven years personally, trying to push them, but the public has really starting picking up on it in the last two to three years. Their enthusiasm really gets us excited, too. I just get a kick out of them still.”
Succulents store water in their fleshy leaves and can survive for weeks out of the ground, as if existing in their own spacesuits, Adrian Higgins wrote in a spring garden column in the Washington Post.
Because of their self-sufficiency, tiny succulents are the darling of wedding favors and can be hot-glued to any number of surfaces. They can be tucked into a bit of soil in seashells, rocks or logs. You don’t have to have any training in floral design to make a killer bouquet of succulents in a pot.
