Plant in full sun to light shade in a well-drained soil and irrigate little to occasionally. Hardy to 20-25F. This plant makes a great medium height ground cover with fine texture that contrasts well with broader succulent foliage. There are many great plantings of this plant in the Santa Barbara area, including a nice large planting under Aloe barberae and Aloe plicatilis in the northeastern corner of Alice Keck Park Memorial Gardens, a beautiful city park in downtown Santa Barbara. The pictures on our website are of this planting.

Senecio cylindricus is native to the Eastern Cape of South Africa from along the coast from Alexandria to East London and - an area that is transitional between the winter rainfall Cape Province to the west and summer rainfall received at East London and further to the northeast. As such this plant seems to thrive with summer irrigation but does well if withheld then as well and tolerates winter rainfall if soil drains tolerably well.

We continue to list this plant as Senecio cylindricus but acknowledge that it is correctly considered to be a subspecies of Senecio talinoides (with the lower growing but similar S. mandraliscae) in Gordon Rowley's treatment of Senecio in his own "Succulent Compositae" (Strawberry Press, 1994) and in Urs Eggli's "Illustrated Handbook of Succulent Plants: Dicotyledons" (Springer 2002). It is more often found under the name Senecio vitalis, a name originally given to it in 1906 by Nicholas Edward Brown (1849-1934) of Royal Botanic Garden, Kew but the name Kleinia (=Senecio) cylindricus given to the plant by Alwin Berger a year earlier in 1905 has precedence. Recent treatment by some botanists have put this plant (and many other Senecio) back in the genus Kleinia, but for convenience and until this gets sorted out and better recognized we continue to list them all in the genus Senecio so not to confuse customers or our staff. 

This information about Senecio cylindricus displayed is based on research conducted in our horticultural library and from reliable online resources. We also will relate observations made about it as it grows in our nursery gardens and other gardens we have visited, as well how the crops have performed in containers in our nursery field. We will also incorporate comments that we receive from others and we welcome hearing from anyone with additional information, particularly if they can share any cultural information that would aid others in growing it.