Transplant rooted plants at any season. Cuttings or joints may be planted in the spring in sandy or clay loam, and given enough water to keep the soil moderately moist. This Cholla endures weather twenty-five degrees below zero without, injury and hence may be grown in cactus gardens over a large part of our country both out of doors and in the house. It is an attractive cactus and well worth cultivation.
CHAPTER VII
A DESERT GRAVEYARD
In the blue ending of a desert day with the sun in the setting and the somber shadows creeping over the desert hills and down into the lowlands and swales, we would if we could build a dream-city story of a ghostly desert village, spectral and silent and lonely with only the dismal howl of the coyote to punctuate our tale. Since we are on a trek into the forbidden land of thorns and spikes and spines, we have but to add the Song of the Desert and the setting of our story is complete.
It is near the sunset time, when the cooling of the desert wind begins and we can view the horizon pierced by the distant mountains and perhaps the many trees on the mountain slopes, while out on the mesas and down in the valleys Nature has painted the floor of the desert with lacework of many kinds of brush, filigree of strange fantastic plants, tall and shaftlike or sinuous and creepy, covered with countless spikes and thorns, armed with innumerable spines or darts; all this is the desert, hot and dry and dusty by day, delightfully cool and alluring when the sun has gone and the moonbeams flit about among the strangely weird fantastic clan. It is the beckoning call to spend the twilight in meditation and rest, and then to sleep in comfort. Here then is the amphitheater of the sun, and ere the Goddess of Night bids adieu to the day, she takes up her baton and the music of a soft desert night begins. It comes rushing in over yonder rim of mountain peaks and down through the trees with a great crescendo till it reaches the mesas and valleys. Then lightly, gently, comes the fading diminuendo, dimming the tones of the desert song, faintly and sweetly with the swish of the evening zephyrs, and the land of the cacti is again at peace.
We are once more on our way to the desert land of flower mysteries and weird plant phenomena. Along the dusty highway one may notice from time to time many curious-looking mounds which seem almost like monuments standing out in the great alone, in silent eulogy to some departed world perhaps. In the hot dry heat of a desert day they are just some more of Nature’s plants and flowers, but in the dusk of the desert twilight these fantastic growths look like some immense graveyard, and we might fancy that we can even read the epitaphs on their beautiful spiny shafts. For in this fancied graveyard of the desert there are many wonders, and now we shall invade their tomblike resting place and get acquainted with still another group of the weird Fantastic Clan. This is the Visnaga Cactus or Bisnaga, meaning “barrel,” commonly known as the Barrel Cactus, friend of the Indian or the lost traveler on the desert. Science gives him the name Echinocactus (derived from the Greek echinos, “hedgehog,” and kaktos, a kind of spiny plant) followed by some less pretentious appendage to denote his species.
GROWTH AND HABITATS
The genus Echinocactus is thought to have originated on the great arid plateaus of Mexico and to have extended northward to the southwestern borders of the United States, where as many as forty species are known to grow. The group is a large one, including as many as one hundred forty species in the two countries where they are most abundant. There are no varieties in Central America, but a number in the driest parts of South America, thriving always in the gravelly or stony soils along the foothills and bajadas and out on the broad desert mesas. The plants are globular or cylindric and strongly ribbed with sharp stout thorns, suggesting at once a barrel in size and shape, with its numerous nails protruding from the circular staves. They grow singly or in groups of two to four or more, from a foot to three or four feet in height, sometimes reaching nine feet. The central spines are the strongest and stoutest, usually one or more hooked, the radial spines also stout; the radial bristles or threads if present are at times rather firm and sometimes quite weak in texture. The Echinocacti have no spines on the ovaries or fruit—a characteristic which differentiates them from the Echinocereus Cactus.
In this great field of Bisnaga, the Barrel Cacti, or Visnagita, the little fellows, we have selected about fifteen typical species although there are many other varieties. It is early in the morning of a hot June day in southeastern Arizona that we start on our sixth and last trek across the desert, armed with notebooks and other paraphernalia of the student or tourist, having selected our locale late the preceding day.
Interlacing Spine Cactus (Echinocactus intertextus)
Southeastern Arizona, Southwestern Texas, and Northern Mexico