Cactus Blog 

Hi I just called about the brown spotting. Thanks for your comments for possible remedy or better care.

Robert

Robert,
It looks to me like it’s just age. The plant is probably fine, and forming bark in the lower “trunk”. Check to make sure it is firm, and not soft. If it is soft then it might be rot, but it doesn’t look like rot to me. Except one branch where there is more than one color – check there especially to see if it is soft or hard. If hard, then you are good to go!

Peter

Editor’s Note:

Today’s Rule of Thumb for this type of problem:

My advice to any of you if you have brown spots is to poke it. Poke it good. If it’s hard then it’s probably healed over, and if it’s soft then it’s probably a rot spot indicating some underlying problem. Now you know!

First up we have the blooming California Native Penstemons.

Penstemon strictus is known as the Rocky Mountain Penstemon.

Penstemon heterophyllus “Electric Blue” is the Blue Beardtongue.

Penstemon heterophylla “Margarita BOP” is Blue Bedder and is our most popular Penstemon.

And now for the non-natives:

Penstemon superbus is the Coral Penstemon.

We don’t have “Firebird” in bloom right now, which is our most popular non-native, so instead, here have a non-native Salvia.

Salvia microphylla “Hot Lips”

That’s a lot of blooming perennials! So many pretty plants for the Bay Area garden that if you don’t live here I wonder why. Go Berkeley!

Opuntia robusta, a large-padded, bluish- skinned prickly pear has small delicate yellow flowers. For all!

I wonder if I’ll ever run out of blooming cactus to photograph and post on the blog? I think not. See you in 2042!

Pedilanthus macrocarpus

Lovely vertical stems with very few small leaves, if any, and stunning red slipper flowers.

It will form a nice dense “shrub” about 3 ft. and is hardy down into the lower 20s.

It’s in the Euphorbia family so you know it has a milky white sap that you do not want to get on you.

We think this is Echinopsis eyriesii but the flower color is different than the pink we’ve had in the past. So who knows! Pretty colors. Everywhere!

Sempervivum “Serena”

Ashby Avenue

Some really nice specimens in this garden. Well tended, too.

Too many different species for me to go about naming them for you, so you’re on your own.

Tylecodon wallichii

I’ve been waiting for blooms for a few years and now we have 3 plants blooming at the same time! I must warn you that it is a very poisonous plant. And it is from central South Africa. It’s a shrubby caudiciform that will grow to 2ft. tall. And I can also tell you from experience that it is deciduous. In fact, they have lost all their leaves this spring as if in preparation for the blooming experience. Tight!

The flowers look very similar to Kalanchoe flowers, as well as the more closely related Cotyledons.

Jason Whippet

Interesting! Someone has found a Ferocactus cylindriceus, aka a California Barrel cactus, in Joshua Tree ie in California where they are normally found, and documented it.

Project Noah

Nice!

I see The Indoor Garden(er) got his stapeliad back to DC safely from Berkeley. The story of how this Stapelia got to DC started in Iowa, where  Plants Are The Strangest People blogged about one first, leading The Indoor garden(er) to stop by the store and pick one up on his travels.

Iowa –> DC –> Berkeley

The circle of life!

By the way, we subscribe to the Stapelia theory of stapeliads, and do not approve of the Orbea theory of stapeliads.

Echinopsis thelegonoides

These cacti can reach 15 to 20ft. tall, which is impressive with those relatively narrow stems. They are native to Jujuy, Argentina, home of Gimnasia Jujuy! and Big Cactus! And just to be clear it’s another big white flower on an Echinopsis.

Nothing
we
haven’t
seen
before!

Pennisetum messiacum

This  lovely and colorful fountain grass is native to Japan. They don’t celebrate July 4th there, so it’s a nice day for Japanese plantings. It does have that Japanese look, like you could paint a screen with images of it. We recommend planting in full sun and the furry burgundy blooms will appear in no time on 3 foot stalks. Divide in Fall or allow seeds to dry on plants.

I don’t have anything to add to the heading above. It is the perfect description of what we are looking at. And yet as your faithful blogger it is my job to type something or other every day so here I go about to try to do justice to this remarkable artifact.

You are having a party tomorrow and you need your summer decorations up for your barbeque will fail without a happy summertime party atmosphere and so you look through the offerings of the party based web and this is what you spot – and just in time to order before your party! What luck! A happy time is had by all!

Vitis californica “Roger’s Red”

Our favorite of the California native grapes. Great color, tasty fruit, easy to grow. They will grow 10 to 20 ft. vines once mature that will cover an arbor pretty early in the summer and help keep all that hot, messy sunshine off your patio, but then will die back in the winter allowing all the warm comfy sun to reach into your living room through the windows and onto your sofa where you are relaxing with a cup of hot steaming joe.

Delicious!

Aeonium subplanum
9th Street

This is a pretty significant bloom spray off this plant, which will be the end of that plant. All gone.

Euphorbia myrsinites in bloom. You have to get up real close to see these blooms. Often the bracts on the Euphorbias are quite large and attractive and so are mistaken for the blooms. But if you get out your microscope, or maybe just a magnifying glass, or even maybe just put on your reading glasses, you can see these lovely little things.

In the case of this particular photo, you can also just click to embiggen.

Look what great stuff I’ve found on the internet machine for you today. It’s Awesome!

Vintage Saguaro Postcard from the Arizona Desert Museum Collection of 1955. Plus or minus.

I wish you all a happy cactus postcard vintage weekend!

Party!

Lewisia Cotyledon

This is a really nice color bloom. It’s one of the Sunset colors. People often ask if we have any orange Lewisias, and so I expect this one to get grabbed up pretty quickly today.

It’s my friend.

So now we’ve hit the true test of our ability to run a retail plant nursery. We are now making our own cactus products. Or product – in this case soap. Cactus Soap!

That’s Olive Oil soap – no glycerin or other fillers – from locally sourced organic certified olives. Plus real prickly pear fruit, and three different scents: Peppermint with Mint Leaves; Grapefruit, Lemongrass with Oatmeal; and Clove and Apricot Kernel, in a thick 5.3oz bar.

See the thing is, there are lots of fancy glycerin soaps out there, but it’s tough to find a top quality pure soap, hand or facial. So we made it ourselves.

Now someone else can post on their blog all about the silly cactus soap they found at the Cactus Jungle. Hah!

(For reference, see my now-ironic posts about cactus soap and cactus costume (on a hedgehog!) and Cactus Glasses and Cactus Candy).

I suck!

INSTAGRAMMED whippet!

Aeonium subplanum
9th Street

And a bonus Asclepias!

Tagetes lemmonnii “Compacta” is a compact Mexican Marigold. Unlike the standard, which gets 5 or 6 feet tall, this tops out at 3ft. And we’ve never had it revert. Excellent!

Kniphofia “Alcazar” is one of the nicest Torch Lilies we’ve seen in a while. The flowers range from a very vivid red to the deep orange you see here. Relatively small, they will top out between 3 and 4ft. tall.

Hardy, reliable bloomers, they should send out new bloom stalks throughout the summer.

In New Mexico, CactGuy shares a picture of a wall.

A restaurant’s cactus mosaic wall.

Nice.

Hi Cactus Jungle:
Can you identify this plant? It is a cutting taken directly from a small tree-like woody trunk about 1-foot tall. It was up-right, no droop or dangle.

Leaves (?) very thin and stiff. Also please let me know if I can start plant from this piece.
Thanks much,
Rosa

Do you have your guess ready for Rosa?

Check it out after the break… (more…)

Ipomoea jaegeri

A succulent Morning Glory! How nice. Once these get to blooming in the summer they keep it up for months. Every day there will be another 4 or 5 blooms open.