Cover your eyes! We’ve lived in California for nearly thirteen years and are heading back to Madison, Wisconsin in about two weeks. I’d like to start posting more gardeny stuff for folks that don’t live in coastal California where succulents grow like weeds and it never rains in the summer. It’s also crazy town expensive. Dipshits like us could just stick plants in junk and call it garden art without ever worrying about a frost or deep freeze.
Just because you’re able to shove a bunch of sphagnum moss in to some piece of crap you found on the side of the road and then stuff it full of the fastest growing (suckiest) succulents you have doesn’t mean you should. I definitely give Matti more credit for these “plant experiments” but I participated in their creation as well.
I showed Matti the top pictures and he said, “They looked good for a hot minute.” Then I showed him the above picture which begs to differ. Here they are as babies almost two years earlier and they still look crappy. What’s up with the hideous red polyester mesh I bought and told Matti to use. The moss doesn’t just jump out of these sort of situations. It definitely amplifies the trashy vibe happening here, especially in the creation below.
For the love of god, we had enough Aeoniums back then to have at least covered up the ugly metal skeleton on what I’m guessing was a former used plastic bag dispenser maybe? It’s hard to shove succulents through that shield of polyester though.
This one isn’t as terrible as the rest, but it’s definitely not a star succulent arrangement by any means.
These have to be the saddest looking staghorn ferns you’ve ever seen. The poor things remind me of a girly show gone wrong thanks to their interesting placement (Matti). That terrible mesh fabric is there again, too. It’s all so bad, but we eventually learned some well placed nails and fishing line works and looks most importantly way better than this hot mess. Sphagnum moss can be a bitch to water thoroughly especially once it gets crispy hence lots of crusty looking plants. I still spend quite a bit of time watering our current staghorn fern flock in the kitchen sink, one tiny little drip at a time over several minutes.
I passive aggressively planted some taller shrubby things, so you’d no longer be able to see the fence eyesores instead of telling Matti that his succulent things sucked. The Leonotis menthifolia on the right, and Athansasia pinnata on the left didn’t grow fast enough to cover the shame quickly enough. My placement of them is also very questionable, but we didn’t have much space. Who the hell plants those between an Agave that will eventually eat the entire area?!?! People who are youngish (it was 2011), rent and don’t care that’s who.
To be fair to Matti he needed something to do in the garden. We could only meticulously weed everything like folks without children do for so long. Making weird succulent crap made him happy and I wasn’t going to stop him. I made many terrible succulent terrariums in my time. I even thought painting this shitty bathroom shelf orange and putting it on the wall was cool. I should have painted it, put plants on it and left it in the backyard, but it was a different time. Matti soon stepped up his junk rehabilitating game with the first succulent table he built from an old art crate he brought home from his job at a gallery. Then he made the infamous big table for Sunset. We also have a fabulous coffee table on wheels Matti made during that period of old shipping crates that I love and use way more than either of the succulent tables.
Far Out Flora 