The house being built to the east of us had a back hoe come and dig trenches on the hillside down the road from us for underground utilities. In the process, the numbnuts operating the machinery managed to trash much of the natural vegetation growing beside the road.
Most of the compromised plant life wouldn’t matter since it was scrub creosote and other brush that will be back with a vengeance. However, there was a hedgehog cactus cluster almost completely covered with the earth piled alongside the trench.
Damsel and I went down the road with the wheelbarrow and dug several lobes of the buried cactus out. Some of it was destroyed to the point of not being able to recover, but we rescued about six viable lobes, three of which we put in our rock and cactus garden seen in the image above. We put the other three lobes in pots pending finding another place for them.
Several of the lobes have flower pods growing on them. We’re hoping that the flowers still bloom despite the incident. Damsel will post a lot of flower pix this spring, so we’ll make a special note when a flower is from one of the rescued hedgehogs. Click on the image to enlarge.