This quite odd little Barrel Cactus is highly prized by the Mexicans and Indians who know it for its fine fruit, which is slender, two or three inches long, and very sweet with many dark brown seeds. The ripe fruit gradually dries, and is eaten as a sweetmeat without any sort of treatment; firm and sweet and very sugary, it is considered a rare delicacy by the hundreds of thousands of tourists who journey to the Southwest in quest of unique desert growths. It is used very largely as a food product by the natives; from the appearance of the thorns the species is named hamatacanthus (“hooked spine”). We note that the flowers are rather large, about three inches long and two inches or more across, golden or yellow suffused with red, and appear in clusters at the ends of the stems, which are generally two or three feet high; the spines harmonizing in reds, purples, and tans.
Mexican Lime Cactus (Echinocactus Pringlei)
Central Mexico (Coahuila)
And here is the Mexican Lime Cactus, which is used for a refreshing drink that is similar to the well-known limeade, and often called the Lemonade Cactus. A little Mexican cactus juice, some sugar and ice-water, a hot day, and you have a cool delightful drink. This species is made striking by its great size, mature plants reaching a height of nine feet, with several stems forming in clumps or growing singly, and by the light red hooked spines which give the stems a reddish coloring when seen at a distance. The blossoms are group flowers of orange-yellow, having the appearance of red on the outside and golden within, and clustering in a circle around the tops of the stems. This fine Fruit Cactus is native to the foothills and mountains of Central Mexico in the Mexican states of Coahuila and Zacatecas.
Giant Visnaga (Echinocactus visnaga)
Central Mexico (San Luis Potosí)
It is late on a sultry day in June and we are speeding along the dusty highways of Central Mexico, intent on our quest for a certain queer specimen of the weird Fantastic Clan, when the long low shadows of the afternoon begin to slant over the singular cactus growths for which we have been searching, and the blue haze of a waning day is seen to gather over the distant mountains. We pause in our hurried flight across the Mexican bajadas, as a strange and lurid spectacle comes into view. It is a forest of the Giant Visnaga, greenish monsters of the desert, appearing to rise out of the ground in front of us, towering on their fantastic yellow-green bodies and leaning toward us, like some strange messengers of a departed world come back to us in this graveyard of the desert. The Giant Barrel is the cactus in search of which we have traveled all the way from Southern California to San Luis Potosí, in Central Mexico, a monster growth six to nine feet tall, three to four feet in diameter, weighing over four thousand pounds; and estimated by scientists to attain the age of a thousand years! One of these Giant Bisnaga has been growing in the University of Arizona gardens for thirty-five years, is only about two feet tall and eighteen inches through, even after the lapse of a third of a century. It is in the highlands of San Luis Potosí that we have discovered this giant, just as our long hot trek is drawing to a close. We see that his trunk is single and unbranched, cylindrical, and greenish or yellow-green. The four straight sharp stout thorns are all brownish central spines; no radials are present. The flowers are bright yellow and showy, and the tops of the plants where they appear are covered with dense layers of long woolly cream-yellow hairs. The large blossoms, two and one-half inches long and as broad, come forth in early June, spreading wide open in the forenoon and closing in late afternoon.
Whipple’s Visnagita (Echinocactus Whipplei)
Northern Arizona, Northern Utah, Western Colorado, and New Mexico
But one more growth of this strange cactus land must claim our attention ere the sun completes his journey across the western skies and the goddess of Evening draws the mantle of night over the land of the burning sun. It is a Bisnaga native to the foothills and high mesas of northern Arizona and Utah, western Colorado, and New Mexico, but we cannot take the time on this trip to study in northern parts. Science tells us that Whipple’s Visnagita is one of the smaller of the cactus clan and is generally to be seen peering out from under other desert shrubs. Little is known about this very interesting but tiny growth. It is far removed from all of its near relatives in distribution, and is to be found as far north as Pleasant Valley near Great Salt Lake in Utah. The ashy-white thorns are half an inch long or longer, many of them dangerously recurved and hooked; its large bell-shaped blossoms form a halo of rose and purple about the tips of this diminutive cactus, quite pretty with the lavender filaments and reddish styles; the styles are finely hairy their entire length, a very rare characteristic among cacti.