Succulents

In my garden there is one type of plant that is gaining prominence.  Succulents are becoming my new hobby plant.  Being heat and drought tolerant, these plants are easy to grow.  They are slow-growing and they maintain the way they look for a long period of time.  Their beauty is in the shape, color, and arrangement of the leaves.  Some of them are glossy while others are matte and still some are hairy.   So far I have a small collection of them but I intend to expand it. My collection does not include the spiny cactus.  I don't intend to acquire them. The roses are already being extracted from my garden because I dislike the thorns.  Heaven forbid that I should introduce a different form of those thorns.    My plants came from various sources.  One of my favorite varieties came from my sister-in-law's (Jennifer's) previous garden.  Another one is from Pat Brown's garden.  When my family went to Point Arena in 2008 for our wedding anniversary, I broke (or more accurately, stole) a branch from one of the plants near the house we rented and now I have a lot of them but I still have not found the name for it.  In the mean time I will call it the "anniversary cactus".  I have never seen this one in any garden center so far.  The rest have been purchased somewhere.   I intend to do my research to figure out the names of all my succulent plants.  That is another project. 

I have enlisted my husband to make me some wooden boxes for these plants.  He has made one so far, and I planted it this morning.  The greyish green color of the leaves contrasts well with the color of the wood.   This is an experimental project, and I'm curious to see how they the whole display looks when the wood ages some more and all the plants cover the soil.