by Richard Pearman

Created on: January 21, 2012   Last Updated: May 24, 2012

I suggest that you look up the Latin names on the internet if you don't know them. Although this concentrates on cacti and succulents, I suspect that the general message applies other groups of plants.

I doubt anybody reads seed catalogs for the pictures or the descriptions of plants. Let's face it, you wouldn't bother if you didn't at least suspect that it listed types of seed you wanted, that was good quality and reasonably priced.

I remember when I was a child, I would look through my father's Thompson and Morgan catalogs and be largely disappointed that they had very little of what I was interested in, namely cacti and succulents. We got their mixed cactus seed, which consisted entirely of large, North American species: Carnegia gigantea, Lophocereus schotii (not the monstrose form), Ferocactus (not sure what species), Lemaireocereus thornberii. We got their mixed succulent seed from which we only manged to grow two plants, both Pleiospilos nelii.

My exotic tastes soon took me off the beaten track, to specialist companies who's catalogs consisted of little more than lists of Latin names and prices. Most succulents don't have generally accepted common names and are naturally occurring without cultivar names. Anyway, as these companies carried seeds of multiple genera they'd need at least the genus for cultivars. (Most succulent cultivars are non-F1 hybrids that don't grow true from seed anyway.) I had to look the names up in books and couldn't always find them. These listed some mixed packets but they were mostly a single type, sometimes even from a specific location. They had all sorts of things you never saw in garden centers and seldom in specialist nurseries: Calibanus hookeri, Fockea edulis, Arrojadoa, succulent Pelargoniums along with endless Gymnocalycims, Mammillarias, Lithops etc.

When I moved to Alberta, Canada, I was very disappointed to find that there were none of the small specialist succulent nurseries like they have in England. What's more very few people seemed very interested in succulents and the selection in garden centers was also very limited. Importing plants is also difficult with legal restrictions and the laws seem to be an official secret. Therefore I've found that ordering seed is the only way to get many types of succulents.

Now, seed catalogs, have, like many other things, moved online. Now you can Google anything. You can copy and past plant names to the search box and see photographs and other information almost instantly.

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