When you take up collecting / growing succulents as a hobby, one thing becomes apparent fairly early on. There are a lot of them! A quick google suggests something in the region of 10,000 different plants, spread across 60 different plant families. So if you have the Pokémon gene, i.e. "Gotta catch 'em all" you're going to need deep pockets and a very large greenhouse.
Which is why (I'm guessing), people tend to specialise - they find a subgroup they like and concentrate on those. Makes the hobby more manageable. And affordable.
As mentioned in a previous entry, in my limited experience, it seems that your average garden centre will stock a handful of the basic plants, and often just labelled as a generic 'succulent' rather than identifying a particular species. If you're after a specific plant, you'll need a specialist nursery which may mean a trip out, but more likely, will mean a trip to the internet.
Having done a bit of reading up before I made any purchases, I had a short(ish) wishlist of not-too-rare and not-too-difficult-to-look-after plants when I finally took the purchasing plunge at a trip to RHS Wisley a while back. And on that list were Lithops, or Living Stones. (1)
While some people choose plants for their flowers, I'm drawn to unusual shapes and textures and Lithops most definitely tick those boxes. They don't look like plants at all, more something that congealed or, as the name suggests, a stone.
Recently I spent an idle half-hour browsing the interweb looking for some of these odd little plants to see how much they cost, how difficult they are to grow and so forth. And I couldn't find them anywhere.
The best I could do was find some seeds on Etsy which, with no disrespect to that website at all, does not strike me as the first port of call when it comes to specialist plants. After a bit of head-scratching, I remembered that after I'd bought some plants from Corseside Nursery (highly recommended!), I'd joined their 'Secrets of Succulents' Facebook Group. So off I went to pick their collective brain.
The lovely Rosie, one half of the Corseside team was kind enough to ask around some other growers and the upshot was that no-one seemed to carry them. But she did suggest that the British Cactus and Succulent Society usually had a good selection of seeds that were available to members...
Cue some more browsing, and £20 later I am a fully paid up member of the BCSS! (2)
A couple of days later my welcome pack arrives. A slew of useful sheets on a variety of subjects - succulents, cacti, propagation and so on, plus a car sticker (very retro), my membership card and a pen. You can't have too many pens.
I register for the BCSS website and find that they also have an online forum. I sign up for this too, and spend some time reading through it. Like any organisation, it seems that there is a healthy dose of internal politics at the heart of the society. I do post a "Hello" thread and a question about propagation, but I think I'll largely just stay as a fly on the wall for now, until I get a feel for the lie of the land.
The other thing in the pack is a small note informing me of my local group, which turns out to meet monthly at Capel Manor, a Horticultural College and public gardens not far from us. I'm just waiting to see if they have any more meetings this side of Christmas. If they do, I'll try and go along to say hi.
And as I type, I've just remembered that one of the reasons I joined was for seeds. I've just gone back in, cross referenced my 'Want list' with their 'Got list' and I've ordered seeds (seed? For 50p, I'm not sure how many of each you get), plus their special offer of "30 packs of Mesemb for £9.50".
I guess we'll soon find out whether Mesembs are Living Stones or not!
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(1) I have also heard the term Mesembryanthemum, or Mesembs bandied about. This seems to refer to Ice plants. I'm not sure whether it's another terms for Living Stones or whether they are just adjacent to each other in the plant world. Something else to research on a rainy day.
(2) For some reason, I suddenly feel middle-aged.
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