Crimson Flowered Hedgehog Cactus (Echinocereus coccineus)
(Named coccineus in allusion to the bright scarlet flowers)
How to identify and how it grows
Coccineus, or the Crimson Flowered Hedgehog Cactus, is built up of stems four to seven inches long and about two inches in diameter. The tips of the stem are rounded and covered with radial spines no more than three-quarters of an inch long. It has three central spines which are much stronger than the radials, all thorns erect and spreading. They are flask-shaped at their bases and are white to yellowish white. The flowers are a beautiful bright crimson, about three inches long, and remain open for several days before they close. The petals and sepals are thick and firm, bright scarlet, and brownish or orange toward their bases, while the tips of the petals are broadly rounded. The fruit pods are very spiny. These plants grow in dense clumps one to six feet across and two to three hundred stems in a cluster, at altitudes of five to seven thousand feet in the foothills and cañons and along the lakes in northern Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah, and in oak, juniper, and pine formations of prairie lands. They prefer the gravelly clay loam of the slopes in sunny exposures and are to be found also among rocks on the high mesas.
How to grow
This species is not injured by temperatures twenty-five degrees below zero, and hence may be grown out of doors throughout the country generally. It furnishes very interesting specimens for rock gardens. Plants grow readily in gravelly loam or limestone soils and may be transplanted at any season. They thrive even in the hot Southwest but should be given partial shade there and moderate irrigation. In these warmer climates they blossom as early as April but rarely mature fruit. They grow easily from seed in moist sandy soil or clay loam with part shade, and preferably in cooler climates.
CHAPTER V
THE PAINTED CANVAS OF THE DESERT
There is nothing so beautiful as the dash of color painted by that great artist, Nature, on the canvas of the desert in the springtime and early summer. It is here that plant and flower families vie with each other in their parade of color and fashion. Likewise man, who is tired and hungry for the great open spaces with his year’s work behind him in the spring, seeks the hidden byways trodden only by the few, where he may tramp and meditate and commune with Nature. He loves to hunt new places, to see new things, and then on some winter’s evening to lean back in his comfortable chair and blow smoke rings around the places come back to him again in fancy, where he found that odd piece of cactus lacework and that patch-pattern of thorns and spikes and stems. And he wonders, then, how such marvelous colorings could be, and why they should be, away out in those forgotten places far from the hoof-mark of a burro or the footprint of an Indian or a daring tenderfoot.
The desert is not unlike some huge canvas stretched out over vast distances of mesa and foothill, valley and mountain, which takes on mysterious splashes of color during each cycle of the spring, fading then in the heat of summer and fall. Imagine if you can this tremendous stretch of the desert-canvas tinted with all the minute tracings of the aurora borealis. For to be sure the image of the great painted canvas of the desert, if inverted and hung high in the heavens so as to be seen in all its brilliance, might well make a more splendid curtain than our own aurora borealis, flashing intermittently across the northern skies in flaming letters of crimson and gold.
It seems strange that some of the desert cacti select the daytime, while others of the same family select the nighttime to unfold their matchless bloom. It seems strange that a plant with coarse colorless bark, gray and hoary as with age, can have such delicate and splendid blossoms. It seems strange that so brilliant a coloring can come from such desolation as the desert seems to possess, where there is little or no water and the days are hot and dry. It is strange, indeed, but Nature works in mysterious and devious ways her wonders to perform.