Such are the fiscal rituals this time of year in these United States….

Our accountant, as would be expected from her exalted position, is Lady to vast estates and oversees many minions from her walled latifundium kissed by the mighty Pacific. I pulled up in my old, ratty, falling-apart-that-refuses-to-die-because-of-its-indominable-machine-spirit Land Cruiser, got out, and wandered about admiring the landscaping as I do every year while I’m waiting for her to shimmer out of her home office and greet me.

I was scooched down in the act of sniffing at a patch of succulents when my accountant made her entrance.** I stood up feeling kind of like a character out of a Jeeves & Wooster story. To avoid making what should be a short story longer, we conducted our business and she offered me a couple of the plants that I had been examining earlier.

I transplanted the plants to new homes in our yard as you can see in the pictures above and below.

I asked her what variety of succulent these plants were and she answered in that tone of voice, dripping with ancient wisdom, I have grown used to over the years, “Giant Green Plant.” That sounded ok to me, so I’m guessing the scientific name would be something like Magnaherbam virentem, of the Family Plantae of course.***

I thought I’d try an experiment and plant a cluster next to one of my smaller redwood trees. I know that succulents are by and large pretty hardy, but redwoods have a reputation for killing lesser plants that misguidedly take shelter beneath their lofty boughs. I did my best by loosening and turning the earth and clearing away the accumulated weeds and debris. So I did my part and the rest is up to this small Giant Green Plant.

I’m thinking of going by the garden store soon and grabbing a spray bottle of stuff that supposedly keeps the deer away but doesn’t harm the plants. I have no idea if the massive deer population that frequents our backyard will like our new additions or not, but I do want to give my new succulents every chance of success.

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* I was going to include this in my upcoming weekly workout report but after I finished typing it I thought text had enough bulk to stand on its own rather than being a subtext in my typically already long workout posts.

** They didn’t really smell like anything.

*** EDIT (April 15, 2021): Someone from the internet narrowed it down to being an Aeonium or “tree houseleek,” which according to Wikipedia, “is a genus of about 35 species of succulent, subtropical plants of the family Crassulaceae.”