Stephen White – Aeonium in habitat and cultivation

After an extensive horticultural training in the Royal Parks of London and at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, Stephen White lectured at Sparsholt University Centre, Hampshire, for over thirty years specialising in Higher Education courses in Landscape and Garden Design and Garden History. During this latter period, he also ran a busy design practice concentrating on the restoration/re-creation of historic gardens in the UK and abroad.

Upon retirement, and after a 2010 holiday of garden visits in Cornwall, Stephen became interested in the succulent genus Aeonium. Initially, he grew showy cultivated forms of this genus but eventually, he became increasingly fascinated by the diversity of its wild parent species from the Macaronesian archipelago and north and east Africa.

Stephen’s talk will cover several topics: the origins, development, diversity and distribution of the genus Aeonium; the establishment of his National Collection of over a thousand half-hardy plants; the problems of identifying and growing true-to-type specimens; and his personal research into the cultivation techniques required in the UK to maintain the 160 taxa of wild species, sub-species, natural varieties, forms and interspecific hybrids he holds in his collection.