One section of our back garden is given over to succulents. It was part of my general plan for the garden, but the location was at least halfway an accident. I had a pot with several octopus agave pups. They’d been there too long and needed disentangling soon after we moved here and I hadn’t much time to figure out what to do with them. So I stuck them in the first available spot.

As it turned out, the place was sandy and the agave pups loved it. Chris Eastoe, our Tucson friend who gave them to me, announced when he saw them here that he had never seen the plants look so happy anywhere, even on their native turf in Sonora. Ten to fifteen years later, all but one of them bloomed, each producing one astonishing tall flagpole of a stem with a wreath of pale yellow flowers circling up it—and leaving behind them as they died vast numbers of new pups. A few of the pups now occupy the places vacated by their forebears. The one original plant that remains shows no signs of being in a hurry to bloom and pass on. Maybe it’s just so relieved to have more room to itself that it’s settling in for another fifteen years.

The succulent area expanded as other things we had in pots began to demand more permanent homes. Two Aloe ferox, now five feet tall and living up to their name, joined the octopus agaves, supplying us every January with candelabras of brilliant orange flowers. I put them into a poem in Lovesongs and Reproaches:

On a chill winter day, the wind

blustering, the rain intermittent,

tall, forked flames rise up

from the vicious aloe in the garden. . . . (p. 34)

They’ve been joined by a couple of columnar cacti and some smaller succulents, including some exuberant patches of Oscularia along the edges. Only the Aloe plicatilis is still in a pot (a larger one than it had all those years ago), as I knew it would get far too big if I let it out.

I didn’t make that mistake, but I did make another one. I had an Aloe arborescens that I had bought in the hope that it was a different aloe—one that I had in a previous garden. Unfortunate mistake. That aloe was dignified, statuesque, and bore beautiful blooms–though the bloomheads had the unsettling habit, in their early stages, of looking very much like a snake’s head peering out from among the leaves. One of these days, I hope to find a start of it again. If any reader of this can identify it, I’ll be grateful.

Aloe arborescens, by contrast, is less of a tree than an unruly shrub—unruly and very energetic. Within the first six months, it had filled the space I thought would take several years. “I can prune it up,” I thought. Yes, but it still didn’t resemble a tree. It just became a taller bush, threatening everything around it: the columnar cactus that I think may be a Peruvian relative of a saguaro, the Aloe ferox, still standing its ground, and the rosemary which is looking rather intimidated.

So it is coming out, and that’s no pleasant or easy matter. Even apart from the spiky leaves and the thickly packed stems, there’s the sap. It starts off a mucilaginous chartreuse. And don’t put a raw stub down on anything you prize. The sap, as it dries, will turn intense purple before shading off to purplish brown.

Ah well! As my friend Joe McInerney used to say, “You don’t have to be a state university to have an experimental garden.”