Ep. 269 Sedums: Tough, Diverse, and Complicated | #GoodGrowing

Welcome to the Good Growing podcast. I am Chris Enroth, horticulture educator with the University of Illinois Extension coming at you from Macomb, Illinois, and we have got a great show for you today. We are talking about sedums, but it's going to get messy today. And that's a that's a promise. And you know, I can't go through this mess by myself.

I am joined as always every single week by horticulture educator Ken Johnson in Jacksonville. Hey, Ken.

Hello, Chris. Yeah, I was not anticipating the the mess when we decided on this topic.

I agree. I think I read somewhere some grad students went crazy with some DNA stuff. And I guess we'll dive into that once we get to that topic. So yes. And we are also joined as always every single week by horticulture educator, Emily Swihart in Milan.

Hey, Emily.

Hi, guys. Yeah. Whose idea was this? This went sideways in the research department pretty quick, but it actually... It's a very popular plant, and so we should dive into it.

We all learned some things. Hopefully, viewers and listeners will learn some things and maybe get the mess straightened out a little bit. I don't know that we'll get it all straightened out for everybody. So everybody, just get on board with that, please.

We might have solutions, but we might not. Yeah. I I blame the National Garden Bureau, who... That was the group that came up with sedum being it's like the perennial of the year or the year of sedum for their perennial category. We've talked about crocus already.

We've talked about the year of the hot pepper, the year of the ficus, azaleas, and now, drum roll, sedums. And, and yeah, as as we've already alluded to, it's a mess. Ken, why is it such a mess? What happened? What happened to our beloved sedum, which we used to just call sedum?

We came across a paper. It's called Linnaeusis phalae, phylogeny evolution and classification of sedum and Crassulaceae subfamily Sempervivoidii. So I don't remember if it was in this paper where I read this or somewhere else, but basically, sedum... For these plants in this family, basically, if they weren't sure where it went, it went into sedum. So sedum was kind of a dumping ground.

As you mentioned, people did some DNA analysis, and now all the sedums, things that were sedums are now split up all over the place. It was a 20 some genera, 30 some genera. They've all been broken apart. Some are still sedums, some are other places. And yeah, I would say fortunately, I guess if we're talking about like kind of the horticulture consumer side, everything is still pretty much labeled as CEDIM even though even if it's no longer scientifically considered CEDIM anymore except for one group which I don't know.

We could talk about that now or later. But it's basically sedum and, high low telethium. I don't know if I said that right, but something like that.

I I just like the high low part, because we have a grocery store in our neck of the woods called the high low. So you tell people you're going to the high low, and that's what it reminds me of. But high low telethium. That's kinda what I was saying in my head, at least.

Which would be Autumn Joy Sedum would be in that group, the You're Taller Sedums. So it's basically that in Sedum for the consumer world, shall we say?

Yeah. And Ken, you're right. It is from this paper as the introduction. Says, and I quote, Sedum is generally considered as a hold all taxon that encompasses the least derived Crassulae as well as the homeoplastic or the transitional phenotypes to nearly every other genus of the family. So if you don't know where it goes, just throw it in there.

Well, I don't know. Let's begin our letter rating campaign now. Because what sedum means, it's Latin. And if you look at the way sedums grow, they kind of especially like the smaller ones, they sit, they kind of find their ways among the rock and among the places in the soil. And so it is the sedum is Latin for to sit.

And so now our sedums are no longer sitting. They're going high low and marching about I suppose. But yeah, yeah, I, I do think and maybe this is one of the possible solutions we'll throw out there. Most people still market these plants as sedum. So you go to the garden center, you go do the internet search for, you know, fill in your favorite sedum name, and you still put sedum there, you're still gonna find it.

But I think we we also mentioned before the show, we're starting to see a couple of those hyalotophylliums, popping up on plant labels, for like our our autumn joy. So I I maybe we'll just, we'll have to erase sedum from our memories.

Maybe.

I think it'll be a while. Might. There's a there's a lot of them. And, Ken, did you already say like that it's about 470 sedum kind of like a... I saw different numbers.

But so this paper kind of referenced once they, with their recommendations and the paper, like part of the reason that this seems to be kind of a mess is because we were classifying things based on observances, like growing conditions, the morphology of the plants, what we could see in this paper heavily focused on genetic analysis. And so by doing that, they were discovering like these plants don't actually have a common ancestor. A lot of them don't have a common ancestor from which they all kind of evolved from, which is generally how we relate things. So now that we know that, when you look at these plants and when you are looking at the different growing conditions, flower types, all that combined, I think it's reasonable to... We can understand why they all got classified together.

Now we're advancing science. We've had this happen before with other plants and probably is only gonna get worse with a lot of different species. So maybe everybody just kind of buckle up with that one. We'll have to keep saying this if we ever dive into more species. But it's fascinating.

And Chris, you kind of bring up an interesting point of like scientifically speaking, are different. But from a consumer standpoint, does it warrant a whole rebranding of CNM? That was kind of with this paper. They offered a whole variety of different solutions to kind of square this problem. I guess...

I don't know if it's a problem for most people. So I'll just say it was a problem, the situation. And one of them was just to be like, leave it. Everything's a sedum. So

You know, sedum's a common name now. Yeah. Mhmm.

Yep. I was also taught stone crop was another name to use. So let's maybe... Could we also describe sedums a little bit and maybe why they were all... Linnaeus's folly, poor guy, if only had a DNA sequence or back then.

I mean, why they were lumped kind of together in the same category is because they're all succulent looking like the stem tissue looks the same as the leaf tissue, the leaves are swollen full of water and moisture. And they, they're, they just look more cactus like I would say just that succulent nature to them. But obviously, yes, as we described, they didn't all evolve from the same, same plant. So many plants sort of found that pathway and evolution to look similar to each other. So should we dive into the three specific groups of sedum that they have identified?

And am I saying it wrong? Or is this not sedum anymore? Maybe we should just put bleep sounds whenever I say sedum from now on. I'll just dub myself, with something else.

Think it's that horticulturally speaking, kind of the three different types. I guess when we talk about growing sedums, you got your upright stone crops or your autumn joy sedum, hylotelthium, now. What would be that? Then you have your compact clumping, which are shorter than your uprights but taller than your ground cover sedums. Your ground cover sedums are are low, like six inches or less a lot of times, and they're more kind of a creeping ground cover, I guess.

So... And your compact is is kind of in in between there, but it's more clumping instead of creeping along the ground.

And when you say upright, they're not large plants. About two foot is going to be the max size for those upright plants. And they do, I saw them describe me like two foot high and two foot wide. And every time I hear them like, Oh, it's just like boxy. It is equally as wide as it is tall.

And so people have seen this with, I'm sure people have seen this in the landscape, whether you recognize it or not. Now people can be more observant. And then that compact is like in between, so about a foot tall is what qualifies it as being compact in the NEI, those ground covers or those spreading or trailing ones. A lot of people have seen these in garden centers or in perhaps your own home. Like a lot of the trailing sedums are popular house plants, which is kind of a fun way to engage with this genus.

I'll be honest, I didn't even make that connection. I've grown some of them, but I don't know. I didn't even think about it. I was growing things, knew how to grow them and never made the connection to the autumn joy out in the landscape to the Burrow's Tale in my house. But now people know.

They all have these like really lovely, like compact clusters of flowers which come in. This was interesting. Either petals of like five or four. And so there's little variation and that might go to... I didn't dive into this as much, but that might also contribute kind of to the mess that the genuses, they might not actually be related.

They may not both be sedums. But they might also be. Again, I didn't look in at that level of specificity. But some are four and some are five petaled. They cluster on the ends of the stems, whether it's like the upright autumn stone crops that are all kind of like in an umbel shape on the top versus the spreading ones that go out and at the ends of those.

Like, they're not runners, but at the end of those crawling stems is where they will flower. Those are visited... Guess, Ken, this is your area, I didn't see a lot. I saw that smaller bees would visit the flowers, but there's just kind of a variety of insects utilizing the flowers because they both have pollen nectar rewards available, but it's not like a specialization. Right?

Yeah. So like for your autumn blooming ones, so your upright ones which are usually blooming in the fall. You know the ones I have in my yard a lot of times it's honey bees. But there'll be other, bees, flies, things like that. You know, this time of year, don't necessarily have a whole lot blooming in the landscape.

You know, that's goldenrod and asters and then some of your sedums. I think we're wet. People have stuff blooming in the landscape a lot of times. It's one of those three things.

On mine, saw some honeybees that got cool this weekend. And so they were like resting. They were pretty slow moving. So I'll send some pictures and you can see some of the insects that were just kind of waiting to wake up, but they were They're also like a robust flower too. So like they were supporting all the insects that would land on it.

That was just adorable.

And I feel like the ground cover sedums. So this is one that we've grown these and like if you go to a garden center, nursery, box store, sometimes you'll find the sedum mats. Those basically a flat where you've got all these sedums are running together. Sometimes it's in like a core mat. I've gotten some where it's more peat but they've got a plastic netting in there to hold everything together.

And those are usually blooming in the spring and you know I bought those and I planted them along our driveway. So we've got a gravel driveway, so that's all got kicked in to the ground next to it. So it's it's crummier soil. So we put some sedum mats down there to see how it worked. And they've...

You know, over the years, they filled in pretty well, and it's it's kind of one or two species dominating it now. Whereas a lot of times when you buy these there's multiple species, but they don't ever actually tell you, at least once I bought, they don't tell you what species are in there. So we went down a rabbit hole and actually found, a company that actually lists, and we can put a link to that PDF in there, but some of the different species that they have at least in their mats that they're making. So we've got sedum acre. So this is gold moss stone crop, common stone crop.

So it's again, all these are kind of that mat forming ground cover. These have conical leaves and they're kind of scale like appearance, yellow flowers, sedum album. This one could take some light shade. It's got oblong leaves and they turn reddish brown in the fall. So some of these, as temperatures start cooling will start changing colors so a little bit of a three season interest there and get some color in the fall.

There's sedum. What's Kamchatka stonecrop? I'm not going to try to pronounce the species name there but this one gets a little bit taller, six inches triangular leaves, yellow flowers and all these have cultivars on them too so you can have golden leaves and more silvery foliage and all of that. Sedum reflexum, some more needle like. It's got a cultivar that's got yellow foliage.

Sedum sex agulare. So this has got leaves and spiral rows, six spiral rows of leaves on it, plus the species name. So there's multiple different species and sometimes even multiple cultivars within those mats.

So you talked about putting it along your driveway, which sounds like an excellent use of these sedum mats. I didn't know that these were a thing. I've never come across them. Chris, you're familiar with these?

Yeah. We've... We planted a few of these at our our demonstration garden here in Macomb. Okay. I I think they called them...

Like, the brand name was Steppables. I think that's what they named it. Steppable sedums.

So that's interesting because we were... I was gonna save this for later, like, in the problems with it, but we shouldn't really be walking on sedums. It's not good for them. That's an interesting brand choice. Okay.

Mhmm. Alright. Well, think

a lot times people are planting them or maybe on, like, brick walkways in between the pavers and stuff to fill in. So maybe you're not walking on them quite as much.

And maybe that's why you don't find them anymore in the stores, that particular Yeah.

When you told me about these earlier, Ken, I was like, Oh, I'm gonna dive into, or just do a little bit of looking into it. And so they're also popular. And in the Midwest, I guess I'll say, I don't know of a lot of this type of garden being constructed, but green roofs. It would be a really good application for a green roof, which is for just a kind of a quick summary. So it's using the roof of a building, designing the roof of a building intentionally to have plant materials on top of it.

And there's a variety of different ways to do it. But some of them are really deep. We can grow more robust plants, but some are just very shallow soil medium. They're not meant to be like a garden. It's meant to help kind of address water that's falling onto it.

So a green roof would be a storm water management type of system, but also can help cool the building by having plant material on top of there, so energy savings. I thought, Oh, that's an interesting... Two different uses, two very different uses. But the way that these lower ones grow, so they would spread by seed or by developing roots on the shoots that are spreading across the ground. So then it would kind of keep filling in kind of a low maintenance, very little watering, supplemental water is gonna need to be done.

It can tolerate periods of dryness. They can be really cold. I don't think we even mentioned like the hardiness. Some of these species are hardy to USDA zone three is what I... It's like that can get pretty darn cold.

So, you know, being exposed on rock cliffs or along really cold sidewalks or driveways, up on rooftops. Kind of an... I don't know. I'm really starting to... I was a fan before, but I'm like, this is a tough little plant.

It's so cute and little and like, you know, we shouldn't walk on it. It's not that tough. But, you know, I developed a reignited an appreciation for sedum. Just kind of understanding how they... There's a variety of applications.

So Illinois Department of Agriculture, their green roof is sedums, isn't it?

Yeah. I think I got a picture of that.

I don't think

I can find it.

Well, they had a meeting there several, maybe a decade ago now.

Yeah. Is it open to the public? Is it designed as a space that people can go to? Do we know?

They they took us up. I don't know if you can just walk in and say, hey. I wanna see your roof. I don't know if they let you do that.

Take me to your roof. I

don't think they would be overwhelmed with people doing that. But

I remember it feeling underwhelming. I I went to a similar green roof up. We we toured the the Ford Motor Company. What is it called? The Rouge Rouge.

One of those r words. They have a succulent sedum green roof also. And I mean, it looks it looks very... It looks nice, lovely, but it's it's meant to be more functional than maybe ornamental. And so it could be a little bit underwhelming.

I think I remember too something about you have to pick the right species, because they are succulent. They do hold water, and that's extra weight. So you just have to... You know, you won't... You don't wanna get the the ones that that get the the very large water retaining leaves on your roof too.

So, yeah, a little bit of water, everything adds up when you got a roof just covered in that particular plant.

Yeah. Water can be pretty heavy. There are... And I meant to mention this earlier, Ken, when you were describing them. There are rounded leaf ones and then there's flat leaved sedums.

And so I don't want people to get confused by that. Like some are kind of a more bulbous rounded shape and then some are more flat like you would see like on your more upright ones is what I've noticed those flat ones on.

Talking about flowers, creeping, those are more singular flowers. They're not like... If you have autumn join in your mind, have these big clusters that the creeping ones are more singular flowers on there. Then late spring summer. So you could have sedums blooming all year if you are close by mostly growing season if you have time to write, got the right stuff.

Yep. For those also, was reading... And I... There's a lot... There's just, like, two ways to propagate.

So the flowers would be one way of propagating. And those seeds for those creep... Those, like, creeping ones, I was reading... Some of them can be carried on the wind. Like they're so small, they can be picked up and kind of transported via wind, which is kind of an adaptation I think of more traditionally for like grasses.

I don't know. It just kind of caught me off guard. Was like, that's a nice evolutionary strategy. Go to where there's maybe bare ground or to that cliff face over there, where there's bare dirt across the way. But then you can also propagate with cuttings.

And the people probably have done this, which is a fun way to to propagate. So

Yeah. You got choices. That reminds me. Do do you guys know the the best way to propagate sedum?

Well, I know how I do it, but it's probably

Cut them into pieces and toss them wherever you want them.

You seed them. There you go. Been holding on to that one all week.

Very good. That's where we get live. Yeah. The good dad joke.

Yeah.

Well, I

don't think need honest. Gonna say I was gonna say, seriously, the way I propagate them is to stress them out because then they'll, like, put on some roots. I'm like, that's abuse. I don't like that I do that, but a lot of my houseplants have been propagated because I stress them out, which, as we've established, takes a lot of neglect because these plants tolerate low fertile soils. They can take out drought.

Might say a lot about how I take care of my houseplants.

I would say probably the neatest thing about acetum is that you can take a cutting from many different species and you go from one plant to 12 to 24 to 40. I mean, just can grow exponentially as you wish. But we've we've kind of been dancing around this, like these growing conditions that sedum need, you know, we talked about they're tough. They're tolerant of dry weather. So what if you were going to tell someone this is where you sedum would like to grow, what conditions would you give them?

Say where to plant their sedums?

Generally speaking, there's an exception to every rule. Well drained soils, full sun.

And... Oh, go ahead.

No, you go ahead,

Well, they are more tolerant of low fertility. And so in spaces that other plants might be struggling, as long as it's not a wet, soggy kind of soil, as long as it's well drained. Sandy soils kind of classic profile for what that would grow like. I think that is always sometimes... If you like, we think we have to fertilize.

So if you're fertilizing a garden, this might not be a good option. They can get like leggy and weak. It might not kill them, they can kinda just kinda lose their, their strength.

What I kept reading was lean soils and or mineral soils. In my brain, this little like person in my brain says all soils are mineral soils. But the... What I think they're talking about is what you mean, Emily, is that they're they're not highly fertile, you know, rocky soils, gravelly soils. So we we had a sedum demonstration space at at our at our office here in Macomb.

And it was flat, not very well drained. We did is we took this... It was a strawberry planter. It was like this three tiered cake structure. And we planted that sort of pyramid with sedums and we filled it with potting soil.

So we thought that will be good, well drained soil. But it's mostly peat moss. It's a lot of organic matter and probably more rich in nutrients than sedum would prefer. And they did okay for a few years, but they really, they began to just fade over time and sort of just melt away as we would say. And I think it's because we probably should have planted them more in like a gravelly type soil and avoided like a heavy peat moss soil, which is what we did plant them in.

Yeah. That makes sense.

Whoops.

Oopsie daisy. Listen learned. So folks, if you're trying to get a like a good sharp drainage in your soil and you're gonna be growing sedum, maybe the peat moss is not the rep to go. You might need to go get some small like pea gravel or something to amend with.

But we should also say that like they are shallow rooted. So we talked about gravel gardens a couple weeks ago. Probably not a good option for them. And I think we kinda cover that on a very generic level. Like these are not deep rooted plants.

And so you kind of keep that in mind also. I want to go back. So I thought of one more thing for propagation because I do think people enjoy growing these. With the more upright ones, you can also divide them. You can do division of the plants.

And so if somebody is like, I don't wanna have more plants and keep the same one, I just need to make this one in more pieces, you can divide them as well. And I would do that in the spring.

Mhmm. Yep.

Let them bloom. Let them... Yeah.

Speaking of springtime, the number one complaint I hear people give is where the upright sedums flop. And I have a sedum in my backyard. I did not plant it. That was the former homeowner. I don't know what it is.

My guess is autumn joy. But I have experienced that every single year. And this year is no exception. It looks like right now a deer or more likely a dog laid in the middle of my Sedum plant. My upright Sedum, my hilotelphium, telphium, telphium, telphium?

Yeah, figure this out later. Hilotelphium. Really, we got to write a letter to somebody about that. That it is sharing space with, Siberian iris. They're like growing in and amongst each other.

And, and right... Yeah. Right now it just looks like an animal just laid on top of the plant. It's blooming. The blooms are actually fragrant and they are a a bright red.

But flopping is a problem. Is there a solution to floppy sedums?

Got them back. Pinch them back in the spring, early summer. I usually go through and do... I didn't do it this year, but usually I go through a couple times. Like first time even sometimes just break off half the stem, toss it, and then it'll start branching in a little bit shorter plant, but it won't flop.

Honestly, it's not gonna flop, but you'll have less flopping or can grow other stuff next to it that's gonna support it.

And the term for this is called the Chelsea chop. Because in some parts of the world, maybe not necessarily Central Illinois or Northern Illinois, you would do this pinching at the same time as the Chelsea Flower Show, which I looked up. Twenty twenty seven's Chelsea Flower Show is May 18 through May 22. So if if you have your your seed was popping up by that time, time to do the Chelsea chop. You just pinch the tops off and

And you can... I mean, you can pinch the you can pinch the tops off, but like when you're pinching flowers, you can go down lower also. You should still leave like plant material on there, you can just go down to like a leaf node and pinch right above a healthy leaf node. So kind of depends on the severity of the pinching that you want to do.

And you do that with lots of plants that bloom in the fall.

Yeah. I think I mentioned earlier too, this is not a traditional plant that you would do pinching with, but I did it with my switchgrass. It flopped all over. We had a big storm roll through and it just is like just wiped out because it was pretty big at the time. And it was really bugging me.

It was smothering other plants. And so I thought, what do I have to lose? I'll just take it off. Like it will grow. I didn't quite know if it would come back as robust and I did.

And it's only like two feet tall. I'm like a little two foot tall switchgrass. So it's a tangent for this, but you can have a lot of fun in your landscape and do a lot of experimenting by doing those pinching exercises.

Did my golden rod this year. Some of it, it's much shorter.

Yeah. That's a good one to do it too. Okay. I should do it to my sneeze weed. That one's always a problem for flopping over.

Anyways, we're on a... We're... Chris, what do we...

That's the next show. Chelsea chopping.

Chelsea chopping. That would be fun. Anyways, show and show and tell?

Yep.

K.

Yep. We'll tell and show. Yeah. Can we talk about Autumn Joy for a second? Just that this thing was popular back in the year 2000.

And when was this developed? In like 1970? I mean, it's been around

50 for five? A Oh gosh.

Well, it has been around. A lot of these sedums are developed by nurseries in Germany, it seems. So Autumn Joy, that's not the name. Like that's not the official name. The official name is Herbstreut.

And we probably should say this in that in the rules of binomial nomenclature, you are not supposed to be translating plant names. So herpsfreude, which is German for fall, I think it's like joy kind of, that is the name of the plant. But there are certain places in the world, like in North America that like to translate plant names to fit their language. So but I have seen this a lot. You can go to a lot of nurseries and, and I've encountered this.

I'm like, well, here's herpsfroid, but I'm looking for autumn joy. No, no, herpsfroid is autumn joy. So just just something to be mindful of. So herpsfroid is probably a sedum that a lot of people have in their yards.

And and when it comes to those uprights, you know, we usually talk about autumn joy, but there's a lot of other upright sedums that have come out. I think recently you've got some that have much darker leaves, dark purple type leaves, was it blackjack and things like that. So there's a lot more variety than Autumn Joy. I think Autumn Joy just is the default for obvious reasons because it's been around for so long and so popular. But there are other types, other colors, things like that out there when it comes to the upright, sedums, stone crops, whatever you wanna call them.

Yeah. There's some that leaves are like black.

Mhmm. Yeah. It was, like, was it... Oh, I don't wanna I don't wanna misquote because it was... Is it an ACDC song that it was named after?

Back in Black.

Back in Black. Isn't that what it is? Yeah. Didn't wanna...

Yeah. I'm I'm looking at it now. That's the only reason I know that. Yeah. I

love it. I want it just for that. Yeah. But I did... There's like Purple Emperor.

There's some of them that... Some of the blooms I've read described as matching your autumn drawer or your Herbstreud. From now on, we should do the German and stumble over that every time. But so in my mind, like coming from a design standpoint, I just... First, I guess I'll say like, I'm usually not a fan of like purple foliages personally.

But with these, I don't know. Like, I think it could be a really cool effect where you have them all kind of like mixed together. Chris, like, you studied design too. Like, I think you could create like a... They're so formal, especially when they stay upright.

They're not flopping. But they're If the blooms... They're tight and compact and just kind of like they have their own strength in their design, like the form of it. Then you add in like that cool color. I don't know.

In my mind, I'm just like, alright, maybe this is where you get me with the purple foliage. Like, I think it could be a really neat kind of aesthetic.

If you want to a I

think as a what'd you say, Ken? Wait.

So if you wanna do a goth garden. Yes. You could do that.

Oh.

My garden wears its wallet on a chain. Yeah, you could do a goth garden. I was gonna say, or instead of the whole garden being that it acts as a focal point as a, as something like specific happening in the garden. Want to call people's attention to this part. And so using a, the habit is very different because it's a succulent.

It looks different than a lot of the other plants that we have out in the landscape and the color to boot. And then once you get a flower on it, yeah, I mean, it just it just it just screams, you know, look at me.

Oh, yeah. That's a good point. Like, where it can be like... It can be kind of a highlight. It can be, you know, what your garden is kind of designed around or part of the garden is designed around.

It also, these upright ones, now that we're talking about design, I kind of am just thinking like the upright ones have a more coarse texture to them. And so they're a little heavier visually in the landscape, and so you can use them that way. But then the crawling, the trailing ones have smaller leaves, can add a lot finer texture, and be kind of a backdrop for your coarser texture plants. It doesn't have to be a sedum necessarily, but, having that texture mix in your garden, adds a lot of visual interest. My, upright sedum is next to, it's a switchgrass volunteer that I have, but it looks really nice.

Like those two, the leaf forms are different, the colors are different, the textures are different. And so I appreciate kind of that pairing. You could do it with a bunch of different things, but that's just one way to go.

I wonder what other companion plants we might, you know, thinking about the specific needs of sedum being more of a gravelly, well drained soil. What comes to my mind is like catmint, Russian sage, pale purple coneflower, not not purple coneflower, but the pale purple coneflower. And and and so so yeah, it you could find other plants to pair well, I think with with sedum.

Yep. And I guess I'll also just finish off by saying some of those, like, darker leaved plants, you can pair them with, traditional green, like, leaf plants, but that dark purple and chartreuse is a very striking color combination. It is not for everybody. Very It eye catching. I wanna say loud, but it's not because of the darker hues of those purple plants.

But it's just... It's like striking. And it is... I don't know. It's a wow factor.

Ken is a fan of chartreuse. Yes, it's a nice name. One more site growing condition thing that I read about was that it is billed often as being very, like it likes hot, dry weather. But what I read is that it puts on most of its active growth during the cooler times of year. And it sounds like it's more like heat and drought tolerant.

Mhmm. But maybe not like, oh, yeah, this thing wants to be hot. This thing wants to experience drought. And so I think it probably, tolerance probably comes into where you find it growing naturally on rocky surfaces. And so they need to have that drought tolerance because you either have rain or you're dry as a rock.

And so I think they've developed that succulent structure. They also have an interesting way for respiration and that they, they're sedums. They can they can take in carbon dioxide and or respire in two different ways. There's a c three pathway, which is the normal way for many plants, but then there's a cam pathway, which don't ask me to say what cam means, but probably could look it up. But I'll put it right here text.

But it so that allows it instead of normal plants open their stomata during the day to take in carbon dioxide. What what the sedum can do is they can switch. They can go and open their, they'll keep their stomata closed during the dry daytime hours and open up their stomata to absorb that carbon dioxide at nighttime, where they're not going to lose as much water. And so that's pretty neat little trick that they can do. But it...

Again, that doesn't necessarily mean that they want to be in a hot, dry environment. So I just wanted to maybe ask you, each of you too, like, I mean, that's what I read. But then there's other literature out there that just says put them in a hot, dry environment. So, or am I on the right path here? Do you think sedum just wants to be sitting on top of the desert right now?

So it's a Crassulacean acid metabolism.

That's it. Real quick

for those listeners who can't read it. And one thing, so I've got the herbaceous perennial plants by Alan Armitage and he mentions in there, what was it south of Zone 6 Or 7, maybe give them partial shade during the, like during the hottest parts of the year, they may benefit or appreciate that. So I don't think you're alone in the readings you've done in that thinking. Yeah.

I think we sometimes conflate or we're looking for a solution that we want a plant to be the answer to. We want a plant that's going to grow in hot, dry conditions, like in gravel. And so we see something that tolerates it and can do well for a while. And then we say, like we just kind of... We let go of the nuance of the plant and we try to push it into, like we grow cactus here or grow a sedum here or don't grow.

All these prescriptions we have are generalities. I mean, there's 400 plus species. So there's probably some that you can just put into a hot dry spot and they're fine. But go ahead, Ken.

I think a lot of times you hear succulent people, go succulent cactus, andre. They like

that. Yeah.

But so my... I guess I would... To put this in a different way, like my wife can eat soup any time of year. It can be 120 degrees outside. She wants a hot bowl of soup.

And I will eat soup, and I will be grateful for that soup when it's it's 100 degrees out in the summer. I'm not... I will tolerate it. But now in the fall, I thrive off of that that soup. So that makes no sense at all what I just said.

But now you know a little bit about soup in my house. What about cold soup?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah. I... I'll take a cold soup any day as long as it's supposed to be a cold soup. Cold chicken noodle is not great because you gotta scrape the fat off the top.

Oh, yeah. Gross. My son just learned about that because we had chicken noodle soup in the refrigerator. Yeah.

Yep. What's the shell on the soup?

Yeah. Yep. Cheeseburgers people do it too. Flavoring. I went...

Here's a fun sidebar. I went... It was many years ago when I got to travel by myself and I went to... It was breakfast at the place and they had strawberry soup. That's what they called it for breakfast.

I was like, this is just a smoothie. So soup is a... A smoothie in a bowl is what I just thought it was. So anyways, that's enough soup talk for the day. But

Yep. Next week on soup talk, Chili.

Is it a soup? Is it a soup? Or is it chili?

Is is stew a soup? Oh my gosh. The the argument is going to be fierce next week.

We thought sedum was complicated and messy.

Yeah. Boy. Stews versus soup? I don't know about that.

Did you guys have dinner today or also known as lunch? Because I'm excited about this topic of soups.

Yes. I just went by and quick quick sandwich for me. Yes. Okay. I can

use soups. Alright. Back. Should we get back on track or keep going on soups? I'm fine either way.

I like soup. Yeah, let's talk. Okay, so we talked a lot about sedum herpstreud and many other Sedum. Is there, I guess before we change to maybe what we might find more locally, are there any other Sedums that either of you grow that or any others as you're reading that you're like, Oh, I would like to try that Sedum.

Like some of the most of the ones that I have are the ground covers. And I don't know what half of them are because I bought the mat and planted it and that was the end of that. And I have not bothered to figure out what they are. But when we first planted, there was probably seven or eight different species and now I should figure out which one this is. It's a cauldron.

It's a yellow one, a little bit of a longer one. It's pretty much taken over Everything is a little more... Seems to be a little more aggressive than some of the others. It's kind of choked out some of the other stuff. So...

Yeah.

And I I actually favor the uprights to the ground covers. I can appreciate the ground covers. I just... I don't know. I really like the look of...

I do have the Herbst Freud or Autumn Joy in my landscape, kind of in a prominent location. I put it there on purpose because I do like... Right now in my landscape, it just is looking tired. The plant palette that I have is kind of spring heavy, and I've been trying move it more towards... Summer's fine.

I have enough. But then the fall, it is lacking. And so I purposefully incorporated this into it and put it in a kind of a prominent location. There are others in that same form that I would like to try. I do wanna try Purple Emperor and Back in Black, just like both of those, kind of to see...

Mostly that's more of my curiosity of like the different colors of the foliage. Like are they black? Are they purple? Like how do they present? And then there's one called peach pearls.

And I will buy a plant just for its name, and that is the one that I will buy just because of its name. I love both. I love peaches. I love pearls. Put it together.

It's supposed to have rose gold flowers, which I'm also intrigued by. So different than kind of the other two that I would have. But anyways, I think I would try more also if I had the right location. Like we've established, I've got pretty rich soil. So I'm not sure they would be long lived, you know, in a lot of locations.

Mhmm. I'm probably in the same boat. I think maybe a lot of people listening are, at least in Illinois, perhaps that, you know, we have pretty decent soil around here. Ken, I wonder if your yellow one is the sedum acre. It's got a yellow tip Mhmm.

Growing point, flower. It's a nice ground cover. I know we've... I think we've grown that one here in Macomb. And and if I can find those pictures, they're on a...

I was hunting around. I have like a a whole library of memory cards here from my my camera. I cannot find those pictures of this Arcedum garden. But if I do, I will definitely throw them in here. I think the...

I I do wanna try the Back in Black. I'm really curious. Also, just like how hot does it get on a on a sunny summer day? Those leaves, if you think about them absorbing that light. Just curious.

I just wanna know more about it. So that's that's more of the upright run. But for the ground cover, I read a lot about Sedum Angelina or Angelica. That seemed like a pretty neat one. It's more of a reddish colored plant, reddish stems.

It has like a pink to white flower on it. And if would ever incorporate more stone into my landscape, which who wouldn't love to have more stone, I definitely would think about incorporating that that Angelina sedum, or maybe that acre sedum in in my in my yard. But as it stands, probably too much shade, too rich soil for most of those right now.

So we've kind of established that we... I mean, like Chris, yeah. I think most of our viewers and listeners are are... Were Midwesterners. We're blessed with some some pretty good soil.

Some of it can be... Have been amended and mucked up, but we're starting with a good base. So we haven't talked about where sedums come from. They're not native for the most part to the Midwest. We do have some native ones, so we'll get to those.

But a lot of the family originated Sub Sahara Africa, kind of migrated into the Mediterranean, into Europe, kind of spread and then popped up in North America, but there's not a lot. So that's like where it came from. So it's okay that it doesn't really grow well here. Kind of wasn't evolved to, But we do have a few native ones. So two in...

Well, two, maybe three. Ken, do you want to take this on first?

Yes. I saw references are two or three species. I only found stuff on two and a potential lookalike. So we've got sedum, ternatum, which is a wild stone crop. So this one has white flowers, one of the four petaled ones, as opposed to five.

It's a spring bloomer, so April to June, maroon, foliage when it emerges and then turns green, as the growing season goes on. Does full sun to shade, like a lot of plants, it's much lankier, once in full shade, more of a loose matte. This is a, a low growing one, more of a loose matte, in shade compared to full sun. It can be found scattered sites in Southern, Central, And Northeastern Illinois, wooded ravines, partially shaded banks, cliffs, rock... Rocky or wooded slopes.

In the wild, it's usually... We found it's usually on slopes with little ground vegetation in or near woodlands. It's about eight inches tall, spreading... Creeping habit will spread about a foot on that one. So

And difficult to find. This is one I lobbied our pollinator website to add. And I don't know. They were probably a little reluctant because they're like, I don't think people can find this one out there. But, we do note on the illinoispollinators.org website that in terms of its availability commercially, it is rare, but it's cool.

It's a cool plant.

I will say I did find it. Well, Prairie Moon Nursery was one place I saw that I did have it. So I'm not saying you should go buy it from them, but that is one place that you can find it. That one and the other one we'll talk about.

I think it was sold out, though. So that kinda goes to was like... Just because they sometimes have it doesn't mean you can always get it. I think there's maybe other options too, but... Yeah.

And then, the other one is Sedum bulcellum, so widow's cross, limestone, or rock stone crop. So this one is actually an annual. It's a winter annual, so it germinates in the fall, overwinters, and resumes growth in the spring, sets seeds, dies. When we start getting into summer, temperatures start heating up. Four to 12 inches tall, has pink blooms with red or black dots on the petals.

And then, again, it has four petals on it, Has lime green leaves, full sun, dry thin rocky soil, and it is far Southern Illinois, like southernmost five or six counties, is where you find it. And this is another one that is listed on some native plant websites to purchase and how easily or how readily it's available is another story altogether.

I might be misspeaking, but I think this one is available as a house plant. I think it's propagated and sold kind of as a house plant Because, I mean, for us at least, we're way out of its hardiness zone. That Southern Illinois distribution I was reading is at the northern end of its grow zone.

And there's one more that's not acetum, but sometimes gets lumped in, Penthorum sodoites. So this is ditch stonecrop, starford or Virginia stonecrop. So one to two feet tall, light green, leaves with red stems. Flowers are yellow green to white. June to September, bloom for about a month.

Turn red, rust orange, in the fall of leaves and stuff. Tapered finely toothed leaves and is not fleshy or succulent. So that's how you would tell it's not actually acetum, but it does look sedum ish, I guess, supposedly. That's why you get slumped in with these. So partial to full sun and and likes wet conditions, which may be another giveaway.

Ditches, marshes, shorelines, and you can find it throughout Illinois. I think most pretty much all of Eastern North North America and The United States, you can find it.

Well, very good. Well, if we haven't cleared it up by now, we're all still just calling them sedums. So that is the common name, I will say. These are sedums. That's maybe that's the easy way to fix this.

They can have their scientific name, but we're still going to call them a sedum

or stonecrop.

Or stonecrop. Yes.

Regardless of what you call them, I think people should try to plant. Try them. It's a it's a different kind of plant, you know, in your landscape. So if you haven't already, you know, consider one of the three types, if not more.

Well, that was a lot of great information about sedums or the high low telethiums. At least that's one group

of

them. Well, the Good Growing podcast production of University of Illinois Extension edited this week by me, Chris Enroth. Hey, Emily, thanks so much for helping us navigate through whatever this is, and I'll just call it a sedum.

It was my pleasure. Yeah, it's, you know, fun to learn, fun to get confused and stay confused. But, no. I do hope that people kind of, like, appreciate the complexity that the plant world is, because that is one thing that keeps me, excited, to keep learning and to be engaged in this position is that there's no way to know everything. And then it changes once you think you know something.

So we will come back time and time again to this discussion.

Yep.

And, you know, I almost there there is a good book out there. It's called Plant... Was it Plant Lovers Guide to Sedums. Now it's out of print. It was printed in 2014.

And I was almost like, let's let's talk about this too. But I mean, lot of the information is still accurate, but all the names are different. So anyway, if people want to check that out, as I said, it's out of print, you have to hunt it down from somewhere. Published in 2014 by Brent Horvath. So some reading for you fall day.

And Ken, thank you so much for hanging out with us as always every single week and helping us shine a light on this this fun article that you sent, both Emily and I, which I did not read, but it had some really cool graphics. So I love me some pictures.

Thank you both. Yeah. I I did attempt to read it. Probably didn't try as hard as I should have, but I did get a little bit red. But that's another one if people wanna check it out.

Can put a link to that in the show notes. And if you need some help falling asleep or you wanna get endlessly frustrated, that may be an option for you. And let's do this again next week.

Oh, we shall do this again next week. Let's let's settle down here a little bit and just talk about apples and how they're so much better than pumpkins in the fall. We are gonna be discussing... Oh, no. There...

I'm getting the stink eye from both cohosts here. Yep. Yep. I said it though, and it's out there. We're gonna be chatting with Grant McCarty all about apples next week.

What to do in the fall? Do you wanna grow your own apples? Hey, Grant's your guy. He'll tell you all about it. Well, listeners, thank you for doing what you do best, and that is listening, or if you watched us on YouTube, watching.

And as always, keep on growing. University of Illinois Extension. I used I used to have a coworker. My first coordinator, she would make fun of me because I had did a sedum thing and like, simpervivums. She called them simperviums.

And she would like do this to me like, oh, go talk about your simperviums. She like do that. She called me a plant dork. A lot of other mean names. I've

See, I don't I don't know if I would take offense to that. I'd like, yeah.

Sure. Mhmm.

Yeah. If the shoe fits.