A little help identifying succulents?

September 29, 2009 4:26 PM

I need help identifying a few succulent plants and some general advice for my new hobby of raising succulents.

I need to identify this plant which I'm not even sure is a succulent, this plant that I suspect is a euphorbia of some kind but I'd love to know the species, and in this picture, I'm guessing on the left that's a sempervivum arachnoideum of some sort, but it doesn't look like the ones I've seen. On the right is clearly some kind of sedum, but I dunno which.

Any other advice for the budding succulent collector? Fortunately I've managed only to kill a couple things before realizing how much I've been overwatering them.

posted by BuddhaInABucket to home & garden (11 comments total)

The first looks like non-variegated Chlorophytum.
posted by iconomy at 5:00 PM on September 29

iconomy- no, it's definitely not that. I did a little more googling and it turns out it's a bromeliad. Not a succulent, but it looks like it'll do well pinned into the hay around the outside of my planter box!
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 5:26 PM on September 29

And, D'oh! I forgot three other plants that need identifying.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 5:40 PM on September 29

The second pic is a euphorbia tirucalli. The website linked has a lot of information about euphorbias in general.
posted by imposster at 8:22 PM on September 29

The second pic in the slideshow on your website is some type of Faucaria.
posted by imposster at 8:28 PM on September 29

More specifically faucaria tigrina (Tiger's Jaw).
posted by imposster at 8:38 PM on September 29

The third looks like maybe a euphorbia caput-medusae (Medusa Head) or another one with a similar form.
posted by imposster at 8:39 PM on September 29

The first one is some sort of haworthia, but I'm not sure of the subspecies.
posted by imposster at 8:42 PM on September 29

Can I piggyback on this question? I have a Hoya plant, like this one, that I inherited. I've never been able to get it to flower, though the person I got it from said it flowered for him every year. He told me to water it only once a month, which I did for the first two years but it was looking very shriveled so I increased that to bi-weekly and it looks much better. Still not quite as good as the one in the picture, though, and still no flowers.

Suggestions? Advice? Thanks!
posted by You Should See the Other Guy at 10:39 PM on September 29

I don't think that first plant is a succulent — it looks like a tillandsia, or air plant. Here's a photo of similar ones I saw last weekend, and a pic of air plants I used to have (unfortunately my kitties devoured them). The haworthia linked by imposster have very full leaves; air plants have thin, somewhat fragile leaves, just like yours.

Air plants care is a good resource.
posted by fraula at 12:39 AM on September 30

D'oh, I just now saw that your "bromeliad" link was to an air plant site, so yes, there you go. The first two plants in your 2:40 comment do look like the haworthia that imposster links to.
posted by fraula at 12:41 AM on September 30