Friday, June 04, 2010

Ode to the dudleya

This year, this season, the park is awash with that most fabulously freakish of native local succulents, the lanceleaf dudleya (lanceleaf live-forever) - enough for a body to notice that there are in fact several kinds. Some grow in solitude, others in clusters. Some stems are red, some green, some bicolor. Some fork into two curlicues, others into threes or more. Some flowers point up, others point down. Some buds are round, some triangular, some trapezoidal. Some flowers are one color, some two, some even three! And all of them look to be straight from the work of one of our local artists, Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss)!

It's a good year also for their live-forever cousins, the ladyfingers.