Lithops Information

Plants for the Southwest and Living Stones Nursery are one and the same. By 1985, my plant collection had outgrown my home and so I left my job as plant propagator at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum to take care of this growing number of plants under the guise of running a plant business. (Luckily it worked!) Fortunately, my then not yet wife, Jane Evans owned a piece of property where she had her flower shop and I could build my nursery, Plants for the Southwest. In 1987, we acquired the Storms lithops collection and were immediately thrust into the mail order world, where we took the name Living Stones Nursery for our catalog business. In 1990, Jane closed the flower shop to work full time in the nursery. We currently have two greeters, Aurea and Wasson (dogs). The facilities consist of nine greenhouses and various shadehouses and outside growing areas, each of a different configuration, totaling about 17,000 sq. ft.. We specialize in succulent plants and cacti from around the world, but we also grow some of the interesting and uncommon desert shrubs, wildflowers and trees, mainly from our region here in the southwest. All of the plants that we offer for sale are nursery propagated plants. Nearly all of these are plants that we have grown from seed. For a few species, we root cuttings and for a very few, we buy seedlings from other growers. We live at the northern edge of the Sonoran desert and are subject to both freezing temperatures (12 nights below freezing) and some extremely hot days (as many as 100 days above 100F, with 10 or more above 110F!). Our average rainfall is 12 inches, with half of it falling in the winter and half in late summer. (This is the defining factor of the Sonoran desert. The Mojave desert receives most of its rain in the winter and the Chihuahuan desert is mostly a summer rainfall area.) Our nursery & mail order address is: