Senecio 'Sunshine' or Senecio 'Dunedin Sunshine' I am of two minds about this plant. On the one hand I wish that more gardeners who live in the Seattle/Portland/San Francisco corridor along the coastline would grow it. But on the other hand I am glad that it has not become a plant that is seen in every garden to become a garden cliché. It has a lot of merits:
- it likes to grow in hot sun, and needs absolutely no summer watering once it is established
- long lived -- the poorer the soil, the longer lived it seems to be
- not prone to any diseases
- requiring little if any yearly pruning
- of a size (approximately three or four feet tall by four to five feet wide) and denseness that, when grown in a group of several plants, will smother any horsetail that might once have been growing beneath it
- evergreen foliage, or ever-silver foliage as the grayish-green leaves have downy, silvery undersides, and the leaf edges are rimmed in silver/gray
It is not a truly rare plant because the better garden stores and nurseries occasionally stock it. For whatever reason, it goes unrecognized for the true gem it is. The picture shown here of it intentionally misrepresents its appearance. If the picture were more accurate, all you would see would be a mass of gray-green leaves dotted with small golden daisies. The brownish background color has been added for contrast. |
