Artisan's Blog

  Plants nourish our bodies and their splendor nurtures our spirit. Plants take forms that suggest works of art, and their grandeur reaches into the soul and captivates people like a beautiful Picasso. The concept of Artisan Plants is to foster appreciation of plants as works of art and to promote and nurture artists whose medium is plants. Like many things, there are mass-produced forms and more high-value artisanal creations which require more care, attention to detail and craftsmanship to produce. Artisan Plants will be a collective for plant artisans to showcase and sell their handiworks - a place where methodical plant...

Why are artisan Haworthia valuable? There are faster growing inexpensive Haworthia commonly available in many plant stores. These are uniformly green plants and rapidly form pups. But the more beautiful Haworthia varieties and hybrids require nurturing - they are slower growing plants that tend to remain as solitary rosettes and cannot be propagated from pups. It usually takes these plants about 4 years to reach flowering size from seed, and with some varieties they can take up to 5 years to start showing their adult aesthetic traits. For this reason, they are more expensive than the more common green varieties....

In this blog post I will look at how DNA studies are changing how we think about what is and what isn't a Haworthia. The genus Haworthia has historically been subdivided into 3 groups: Genus Sub-genus Representative plants Haworthia Robustipedunculares  Haworthia Hexangulares Haworthia Haworthia   In this scheme of things both the soft leaved windowed haworthia and hard leaved Haworthia were both considered Haworthia. I always wondered about the validity of this grouping because, except for the flowers, the hard leaved Haworthia felt closer to gasteria to me. DNA studies can provide more concrete evidence of relatedness of organisms than morphological traits...

 2022 update: This blog was originally written in 2017. I thought I would post an updated picture of the cover plant 5 years later. It looks quite different!     How to keep Lithops alive Lithops are captivating weird plants that many people love. They are easy to raise from seed but harder to keep alive once they reach adulthood.Here are some guidelines for long term sucess based on our experience:Soil: Unlike Haworthia, Lithops won't do well planted in pure pumice.  They have fine roots that need to grow into a more fine substrate. I have had luck planting them in...