Growing Cactus in Washington
The Tacoma Zoo has it all figured out.
At Tacoma’s Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium a full blown – and often blooming – cactus garden is thriving alongside the meerkats and lemurs.
It seems like an oxymoron of gardening: a cactus garden in the soggy Pacific Northwest. Don’t these leafless plants need long days of scorching sun and drought-like growing conditions?
…The garden just inside the main entrance to the zoo is now in its fourth summer. The long crescent-shaped space contains not only cacti but other arid zone plants…. “Year-round this will stop people,” Jones says of the garden. “(There are) lots of questions about how to grow these.”
Indeed if you read further into the article they tell you how they succeed. Including this truism:
“Snow is a positive. It acts as an insulator.”
