More impulse buying! Plants again but not from our usual places of temptation, nurseries and garden centres. On recent visit to Ikea to buy curtains and cushions we discovered some succulents being sold as house plants. As we already have a selection of Aeoniums and Echeveria which we grow outside in pots in “The Rill Garden” in the warmer months and overwinter them in the cool end of the greenhouse, we imagined a couple of these would be useful and colourful additions. So we bought seven! Typical gardeners’ impulse buying!

They make a pretty colourful bunch!

These are the three Crassula we bought, with their slightly curled, glaucous leaves subtly edged in red.

This Crassula sports mahogany tinted leaves which are shiny and rounded, in fact almost tubular.

This close-up view of the Echeveria illustrates its metallic, pinky purple flattened succulent leaves.

The Haworthia is almost like a clump of tiny Aloe, its grass-green leaves spiky with tiny saw-tooth ends.

So we now await warmer, sunnier days when we can plant our new succulents in pots outside and see how they fare.