Cactus Blog

A little extra watering wouldn’t hurt now that we’re coming into the hottest and driest part of the Northern California year.

Drink lot’s of water yourself, close the blinds and open the windows rather than turning on air conditioners, and an afternoon nap sounds good too. I’m tired, but Obama is coming on in a few minutes and the C-Span feed doesn’t have any of those ridiculous talking heads that are on all the other channels. I saw David Brooks immediately following Al Gore’s speech and nearly gouged my eyes out. Oh the pain is strong in that one. That should be my quote of the day.

I tried a new drink this evening. I don’t know the name, but it was Gin, Lillet and Bitters, shaken not stirred. Very delicious. It must be the heat.

Tomorrow we get a new Zebra label printer to replace the new one that is deeply broken, but Zebra wanted me to ship them the brand new broken printer for them to repair and send back in a month or two instead. Hah! I demanded my money back so instead they are overnighting another new one to arrive tomorrow. If it doesn’t arrive tomorrow, I think I will be done with them.

And don’t get me started on our new POS system.

Sempervivum “Black”

These cultivated rosettes are called “Black” not because of the dark tips, nor because as they grow they look like Echeveria “Black Prince”, but rather they were named after a fictional character named Doriet Black in a very popular Victorian novel from 1882.

In the novel, The Mystery of Doriet Black, Doriet Black was a fishmonger on the backstreets of Manchester, however he was also a secret agent married to a Prussian Princess. So you can see how the Victorian gentlemen of the time, amateur gardeners all, thought that might be an appropriate character to name a clever little sempervivum after. And they were right. We thank them for their resourcefulness.

However, things went bad in the sequel, The Deathly Hollow of Black, when Doriet Black turned out to be a triple agent in the service of an Italian Counterfeiter. Because of the uproar in 1886 over this 2nd novel, really more of a novella, the plant went out of style for over 100 years, returning to the succulent-growing public only in 1990.