Category Archives: Cactus & Succulents

I’m At A Loss For Words

Americana, Cactus & Succulents, Current Affairs, Israel

I haven’t blogged in weeks, not because nothing has happened – it has, both to the world and me – but because I seem to be in a loop. Everything in my life and everything I want to blog about seems to be on repeat. We went to the Carizzo Plain some time ago, hoping to see a superbloom. It turns out that we were a little late, but it was still nice. But I’ve written about the Carizzo Plain’s Superbloom several times, and doing it again just seems superfluous.

One new thing: we went to the Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek over Easter. Now, thinking back on it, I’m surprised I haven’t gone before. I have certainly heard of it for years. I was working as a Construction Manager only a few blocks away in the late 1960s, but it was still a farm in those days. Now it is primarily a cactus and suculent garden, beautifully laid out.

A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again, President Donald Trump said, referring to what would happen to Iran if his demands were not met.

How deranged do you have to be to be upset with the Pope for preaching about peace and love in the spirit of Jesus Christ? Representative Ilhan Omar (who is a Muslim in case you didn’t know).

To change the subject to something which is actually sort of new, the Wall Street Journal – which I don’t read, but saw in Which Car – Reports from April 15, 2026, indicate that senior defense officials have held preliminary meetings with top executives from Ford, General Motors, GE Aerospace, and Oshkosh Corp. The goal of these talks is to determine how quickly the domestic auto industry could pivot to a “wartime footing” if needed.

We seem to be running out of munitions, especially anti-drone munitions, in our so-called war with Iran, and that doesn’t surprise me. I was stationed on a Hawk anti-aircraft site in the mid 1960s, and we had 18 missiles ready, or near ready, to fire with another 18 missiles in the onsite maintenance-storage facility. There were 16 HAWK batteries in Korea and China, alone had an estimated 3,000 planes, so it never seemed like we were very serious about protecting “Freedom’s Frontier”. It still doesn’t.

A Couple of Blooming Mammalarias

Around home, Cactus & Succulents

There are flowers that bloom in gardens
      Under a gardener’s care,
      And their lavish beauties charm me,
      As they flourish in luxury there. 
      There are flowers that blow in the meadows, 
      Kissed by the rain and the dew,
      In a riot of happy blooming,
      And I love their loveliness too.
But the flower that fills me with comfort,
      And makes Life’s meaning sweet,
      Is the flower that blooms in the desert,
      In the midst of sand and heat; 
      Whose roots draw strength and beauty,
      From a land forbidding and wild, 
      Whose face turns bravely skyward,
      Nor pines for lot more mild…To a Desert Flower by Hattie Greene Lockett, American writer, rancher, and clubwoman (whatever the hell a clubwoman is). 

Our results showed that from 4.5 million years ago, the arid regions of Mexico were the locations for abundant cacti speciation. From these lands, cacti have colonized most of the Mexican territories, the southern regions of the United States, as well as the Caribbean. Delil A. Chincoya, Salvador Arias, Felipe Vaca-Paniagua, Patricia Dávila, and Sofía Solórzano, Phylogenomics and Biogeography of the Mammilloid Clade Revealed an Intricate Evolutionary History Arose in the Mexican Plateau

Our garden is in full bloom, or, at least, as full a spring bloom as we are going to get this year. It got warm early, and everybody started growing, stretching, seeking the sun’s warmth, then it got cold, and everybody hunkered down, confused, including me. I left out several plants I had taken from the greenhouse where they had spent the winter, and they were especially unhappy. One, a Pachypodium – a very succulent member of the Oleander family – even committed harakiri.

Even with everything else blooming, like Hattie, the clubwoman from Arizona, I am most fascinated by the small cactuses in pots on a table on our deck.

Cactuses like the Paraodia, below, which grow at about 1,000 feet to 2,500 feet on the eastern slopes of the Andes in northwestern Argentina and southwestern Bolivia.

And Mammalarias, which grow primarily in Mexico but have spread to Central and Southwestern United States, to Colombia, and the Caribbean.

Epiphylums

Around home, Cactus & Succulents

  We have had a couple of hot days, and – it seems like all of sudden – our Epiphylums are blooming. Epiphylums are epiphytic cactus.  Epiphytic meaning they are arborael; they grow in trees like some orchids and bromeliades, but are not parasites. The plants we have are  from tropical areas of the Americas and are not species but have been hybridized for their flowers which I am normally against (because I am a species snob).

The flowers are spectacular with flowers up to 4″ across.

On the road to Las Vegas, a layover day in Mojave National Preserve

Cactus & Succulents, California, Photography

Our first night in Mojave National preserve, we went to bed about ten PM so we would be ready to get up early. About one o’clock in the morning, it started to rain. Rain may be over dramatizing it, a few isolated rain drops started falling. This has happened to me several times camping out in the desert and, every time, it soon stopped. My first thought was to ride it out but, after about a minute – it is hard to tell accurate time in the dark, at one o’clock, with heavy cloud cover;  it could have been less, probably not more – I got up, threw my ground cloth and sleeping mat into the back of Ed’s truck and climbed into the cab with my damp sleeping bag.

It was warm, so I went back to sleep. At about three o’clock, when I woke up, the sky was clear and I was uncomfortable sleeping sitting up so I got out, took my ground cloth and sleeping mat out of the truck, laid out my bag, and went back to sleep. All in all, I was probably awake for ten minutes and was ready to go when the sun came up. I am still sort of amazed at how painless the whole experience was.

After a quick breakfast of Kellogg’s Super K and no tea or coffee – because we didn’t have a stove – we set out to explore. I first went to the area the year after I fell in love with the great California desert in April of 1977.

As an aside, Alan Cranston was then a California Senator and was pushing for a national park in the area. The problem was that the other Senator was always a Republican and the rule of the day – I don’t know if it is official or unofficial – was that both Senators had to agree to make it a park and the Republicans didn’t want to. Shortly after Dianne Feinstein became Senator, giving the state two Democratic Senators, the Mojave National Preserve was established, in 1994, along with the change – and enlargement – of Death Valley from a National Monument to a National Park. The Preserve is administered by the U.S. National Park Service and is located in California about three hours south of Las Vegas which was very handy for us. The Preserve is about the same size as Delaware at 1.6 million acres but with a lot less people (although with railroad tracks running through it and lots of power lines, only about half is designated wilderness). But there are three major mountain ranges; some great, 600-foot-high, sand dunes; several volcanic cinder cones with lava flows; and a couple of dry lakes. End aside.

We planned on exploring two areas, the Hole in the Rock area of the Providence Mountains in the morning and the Kelso Dunes in the late afternoon. On the way to Hole in the Rock, I was a little surprised at how many inholdings there were and how used up the land seemed. People have probably been running and over grazing cattle here for over a hundred years which may help to explain why the Republican Senators were against establishing a park.

.We did see more flowers than I expected, however, including some nice  orange mallows – Sphaeralcea ambigua – which I think is related to the marsh mallow

and our friends, the same Echinocereus that we enjoyed near our campsite

but my favorite plant that we ran into was Salvia dorrii – desert sage – with its balls of purple flowers each with tiny purple orchids growing out of them

When we got to  the Hole in the Rock visitor center, I was reminded – again – how good government architecture is. Not just in the big, expensive buildings like the Federal Building in San Francisco (not my picture)

but in cheap, small buildings, tucked away behind the mountains, in the desert; just fitting in perfectly with its solar panels – solar photovoltaic panels? – mounted on cheap, concrete, highway dividers.

We spent the late morning walking a couple of trails in the area and it almost felt like we were walking through botanical gardens.

Then it was back to the Visitor Center to have lunch in the shade of the covered porch.