Izzrd,m I'll keep my eye out for hercules. As you said though, I suppose for now if I want the quick trees I should just go with Goliath and any head that falls I can use for another tree. I'm going to be doing the landscaping at a lot of friends and family houses so the more cuttings and fast growing plants the better. I like my little Aeonium" factories". They just keep popping out heads and the more I just keep propagating into new plants ;-) Amazing garden Hoobv. Wow I'd love one like that some day. I had read that the plicatilis has lots of issues with growth, like they get a lot of black lower leaves and prone to rot. Has this been the case with yours? What area of SoCal are you in? Cactuscharris- for some reason I'm not able to purchase the plicatilis on that site, not sure if it's a gliche or if they're just out of that particular plant!!! Cool I was searching google and there are some variagated forms of the aloe trees!! Very cool.. ...so many succulents, so little time (and money!)

I cut too deeply that water a nutrients will no longer flow to the main head? Or did I cut to much bark off the circumference of the tree that it will kill it? A tree Aloe is not like a tree trunk that becomes wood and bark. A tree aloe is dried up stuff on the outside and then succulent stuff inside that. As the trunk gets bigger and bigger it has more dried up stuff on the outside and more succulent stuff on the inside, but no wood. So you didn't cut off bark, really. If I cut off the main head, will new growth appear out of the top of the trunk? Kind of like when people cut the heads off their ponytail palms? likely the other rosette will take over. Most of the stem you cut off will probably die, you might get another rosette lower down. Or you might not. I really don't want to do that, how long do you think it will take before I know if the main branch is going to die or not? Will the leaves just start to wilt and turn to mush? would more likely dry up than mush up. I have a thraskii that had a very bent stem at first. I thought the top would snap off. It did not. As it grew, it has become quite straight. The bend didn't straighten out, the trunk outgrew the bend. I have optimal growing conditions for Aloes. Your MMV depending on your climate. If you only cut off a quarter of an inch, the stem can thicken up as it continues to grow and you may see nothing more than a small scar. Try very hard to avoid any rot in the future.

Thanks for the photo. Never have seen one of these before. ( I am also in the Bay Area. ),,,,,,flower looks almost yellow in the photo. Lots of deep orange aloe flowers growing in my neighborhood--I have a few (,Aloe Arborescens) in bloom now.

rosemariero, thanks! Hopefully you'll be able to easily find Aloe africana! If not then you're welcome to drive up and pull weeds for africana seeds... j/k (kinda). So you're a big fan of how I pronounce Kalanchoe? :P Well... I do have a ton of Kalanchoes... many of which are blooming right now. So maybe I'll make another video but this time featuring nothing but Kalanchoes. I might end up awesomely pronouncing "Kalanchoe" around 20 times! I think my favorite is Kalanchoe uniflora. hoovb! I planted it in 2010. It was in a 15 gallon pot from Rancho Soledad. In my blog entry for this video... I linked to my other blog entry about Hercules (with before and after photos). Towards the end of that blog entry I included this link to your blog. Your collection of tree Aloes is better than mine! Have you already made a tree Aloe video that I don't know about? If so, then please share the link! If not, then you should make one! The way I rationalized it was... that maybe even a bad video of my tree Aloes is better than no video. Just saw the photo of the mockingbird perched on your Hercules. Around three years ago some mockingbirds actually built a nest in my Hercules. Then they would dive bomb anybody who got even close to Hercules. Hercules grew so fast though that the nest fell out when the leaves it was built on fell off. Well... the baby birds had already flown the coop so I suppose Hercules didn't grow that fast. But then the next year the mockingbirds rebuilt the nest in Hercules. It's still there but empty now. I wish that I had pointed it out in the video.