Pink Flowered Visnagita (Echinocactus Johnsonii)
Eastern California, Northwestern Arizona, Western Utah, and Southern Nevada
This very attractive and interesting Visnagita rarely grows in any abundance. It is quite outstanding because of its symphony of color radiating rose and gray and purple hues from the thorns, and the large deep pink blooms two and one-half inches long and broad, bell-shaped panicles clustering in a mass of cream-white hairs. The erect ascending spines grow straight or slightly curved, in dense layers, and sharp. Johnsonii likes the sunny exposures and seeks the arid rocky or gravelly soils. The species is named for Joseph Ellis Johnson, an amateur botanist of southern Utah.
Golden Spined Barrel Cactus (Echinocactus Rostii)
Southeastern California, Western Arizona, and Lower California
Echinocactus Rostii, or the beautiful Golden Spined Barrel Cactus, with its bright yellow stamens and petals tinged with red, when in bloom, and the striking golden-yellow spines, appears at a distance like a bundle of straw. The flowers, an inch or so long and about as broad, are borne in a circle clustering around the tops of the stems, which grow singly or in clumps of two to ten, four to nine feet high according to age; the spine clusters are about an inch apart, golden and straw-yellow suffused with pink near the bases, sometimes pink banded with the tips growing straight or curved, all spines very fine hairy. The species is named for E. P. Rost, who discovered it, and is found in a very restricted area among the arid, gravelly or rocky foothills and bajadas or mesalike mountain slopes and cañons. The plant is a striking object against the landscape in its dense spiny armament, rendered impenetrable by the beautifully mottled stout spines extending in every direction; then in April come the golden blossoms encircling the tips of the stems in a flashing aureole of light.
California Barrel Cactus (Echinocactus acanthodes)
Southeastern California, Lower California, and Southern Nevada
The California Barrel Cactus, Echinocactus acanthodes, grows in arid, gravelly or rocky foothills and arroyos on the deserts of southeastern California in the Imperial Valley, and in northern Lower California. This species grew formerly in great abundance on the rocky, gravelly mesas of the Coachella Desert near Palm Springs, California; now, however, many of the fine large specimens have been removed, and the sticky pulp of the stems utilized for cactus candy manufacture. The name acanthodes refers to its many spines, a gray-yellow fringe of seven or eight stout needlelike bristles, and eight or nine pink and yellow banded radial and central thorns one to two inches long, the lowest one sharply hooked. The plants grow nine feet tall at times, occasionally only a foot or so in height, generally with single stems seven to twelve inches in diameter according to age; the flowers are bell-shaped, blossoms of rare beauty giving a lovely golden cast to the landscape in April and May; the fruit is borne in a circle of greenish yellow suffused with purple, around the tops of the stems, and matures in July.