It’s easy to go down a rabbit hole while designing.
Which echevaria do I want to use with this project? Is there an appreciable difference between Echeveria imbricate and Echeveria elegans?
There are a couple of plant sites I tend to click on first from a Google search. Monrovia has a nice site, searchable, nice pictures, good info about plants, often more in-depth articles can be found on the site but the plants are not specifically geared towards our climate. San Marcos Growers also tends to have useful and interesting info, a larger variety of cultivars and extra articles about some species.
For instance, while looking up info on echeverias on San Marcos Growers I fell down a rabbit hole about Atanasio Echeverria y Godoy, a Mexican botanical artist in the early 1800’s, who the genus Echeveria was named after. I just love when I stumble on some serious plant geeks. I’m not really one myself as I just don’t retain enough info in my own brain. But I am geeky enough to want to read about and/or listen to the hardcore geeks.
So anyway, Atanasio Echeverria y Godoy. He was a Mexican botanical artist and naturalist in the 18th century. He joined an Spanish scientific expedition looking at new flora and fauna in the Spanish territories. A bunch of these illustrations were thought lost but then were found in a private collection in like the 1980's.
I just read way too much about Mexican and Spanish dudes gallivanting about California and Cuba etc. All that lead me to an article on Smithsonian.org: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/botanical-wonderland-resides-world-rare-and-unusual-books-180969096/
Which led me to google the name Jane Webb Loundon. OH MY! Gardener, Garden book author, science fiction author and illustrator?! My new historic crush! She wrote a science fiction novel when 17 in 1827 after her father died called The Mummy!: Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (<---purchasable on Amazon! i just bought the kindle edition and I can not wait to read this) in which ladies wore trousers and hair ornaments of controlled flame. John Loudon, the editor of a gardening magazine read her book and wrote a good review in his magazine. When he sought out the author found out it was a female and they got married a year later?! So that's where my google search for Echeverias led me...
http://www.huntbotanical.org - pretty cool! tons of gorgeous and historic botanical illustrations!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Botanical_Expedition_to_New_Spain
https://library.si.edu/libraries/botany
Read more about Jane Loudon here: http://www.artinsociety.com/forgotten-women-artists-2-jane-loudon.html
More about Jane's garden books: http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/m/mrs-loudon-victorian-garden/