I volunteer at a botanical garden and am at present accessioning many new plants including lots of sempervivums. I bought two rather old books on alpines and rock garden plants to assist in recognizing the plants. Sometimes the nursery tags gets mixed. Would you recommend an authoritative books I could buy to help with this. Thank you for a really informative article and very timely for me.

Thank you for such a great article on sempervivum Julia. It would be wonderful if we had a way to do this again, many of today's semps are miss identified. It is helpful that our semp group here at ATP and Peter's group in Germany are working hard to untangle some of this.

Mary, the best thing you have at this time are the database here at:
ATP: The Sempervivum Database
Sempervivum-Liste: http://sempervivum-liste.de/
Horst Diehm: http://translate.google.com/tr...

Semps can change in appearance throughout the year, so having databases that show the individual species/Cultivar in all it's variations is very helpful. I do not know of any book at this time that can do this.
There will be a book on sempervivum coming out in a few years, by Kevin Vaughn. But it could not possibly have all the semps in it, as there are now thousands of new hybrids.

Your job sound fascinating.

Mary you will find the sites Lynn listed very helpful. What a great job you have.

Oh my--This is precisely why I find it necessary to love and appreciate all the undecipherable variability regardless of the identification!

Actually, I wish I had known that there were thousands of cultivars and that one day, upon realizing that the majority of my semps were now, gasp, officially 'NOIDs', that I should have saved the tags and kept track of which was planted where.
Still, as it is, I have no problem discarding ugly tags, but I could never discard my beautiful semps just because they have no identification--that's crazy Of course, I am not breeding them or selling them or pretending they are anything more to me than the lovely living decorations that I adore

Thanks for this article Julia...loved it!

Love your attitude dirtdorphins. Once I move semps into projects they become NOIDs, and help create beautiful plantings.

I wish our rock garden looked as lovely as all the ones I see down south. Ours is pretty, well, scoungy. The individual plants are interesting but there are no drifts of flowers like in the gardens below. I am ear marked for the peonies in a variety of beds but I think I have the most interest in the forms in the rock garden.

I like your article Springcolor! It has me so curious about ways to keep the current ones correct! So glad there are the Euro sites and ATP - we're getting there!

Even the Euro sights have had miss identified semps, mostly ones from the US. That is why it is good to have the ability to cross reference, then discuss if something is amiss.
I love that the team of collectors/hybridizers here at ATP come together to research a plant when we find one that may not be correct.