Hi Hedgie,
Aeoniums start looking pretty scraggly by the time they reach heights of about 2 feet. The reason being offcourse that, the leaves below the rosette die and fall off. Most of the time you do get bracnhes from down below, but that is not gauranteed. What I do, is to simply cut off the rosette , taking care to leave about 6 to 8 inches of stem on the rosette, leave it to callous and them plant in some good potting mix. The bare stem that is left behind, ususally gets about 2 to 8 offsets, that again grow into rosettes - a very pretty sight. Alternately, if you have a bare stem about a meter high, I would cut off pieces of the stem at 8 inch regular intervals, and plant each of them in order to get a large number of rosettes. I currently have 3 clumps of aeonium rosettes, out of which 2 of them are the schwartzkoff species.

Thanks a lot. I'll try that because i really like the plants and would hate to lose them. It is a bit intimidating to suddenly take to a plant with a pruning saw and cut it into bits but if I don't I think that it will just disappear. hedgie

Remember that Aeoniums are Winter growers. Maybe leave it a bit longer to behead ?

echemaniac is quite right. I would postpone the beheading to about end of autumn.