On Cactus

On our guided tour of part of the Desert Botanical Garden, the docent explained to us that a cactus has three essential things – a cuticle to hold in the water and sugar that it stores, an extensive root system to gather what little moisture is available in the desert, and an attractive flower to bring in pollinators.







In this first picture, of a cluster of barrel-type cactus, you can see the cuticle and the means of storage – barrels. In all of the others, the blooms are the outstanding feature. The first blooming cactus is actually not from the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix but from our friend Margot's front yard in Tucson. It's a Mammillaria cactus with an attractive wreath-shaped bloom. Then comes a Cholla cactus with bright pinkish blooms, followed by a prickly pear, and yes, those are real orange blooms, not some pieces of Chihuly glass dropped in there.

This last one is the most amazing of all . . . remember, as you can see, that cacti are inherently ugly and threatening with their bristles/spines/stickers, but this last one looks just like that piece of exposed root in the upper middle of the picture every day of the year, and for 364 nights of the year. But on one night, for just a few hours, it puts out these
lovely white blooms which wither and die before morning. It's called the "Queen of the Night" and it's Arizona's species of the "Night-Blooming Cereus." No, we did not actually see one in bloom, only the ugly root-like stem – this is a picture of a picture . . . but, as with all cactus, it does store water and sugar – if you were to attempt to pull that " ugly root-like stem" out of the ground, you would find yourself tugging on a large bag/sack of water and sugar, perhaps as much as fifty pounds of it stored just under ground! Cacti are truly amazing!