Home & Garden

While I was up on the hill at the back of our property last week, I found several more of the Arizona Queen of the Night cacti. This one, in particular, is very weird; the woody part of the cactus comes out of the ground at the lower left of the image and winds up and across the branches of a palo verde, then descends toward the right side of the image before splitting in two and connecting to two fleshy stems rising upward. Roll your mouse over the image to highlight the strange routing of this specimen.

Realizing that the image above is lacking in detail, I uploaded a larger highlighted image here. I also uploaded images of the other three queens I found up on the hill here and here.

Since I know that this variety of cactus has a ball root, I imagine the big one must have a whopper. I read somewhere the roots could weigh in at hundreds of pounds.

I get these flowers for most of the year. It seems that the venerable little Bishop Cap cactus keeps on producing these after nearly seventeen years since we adopted it in a three-inch pot just before we got married.

The cactus had been transplanted three times and has lived with us in both California and Arizona and just keeps on giving us flowers. Click on the image to enlarge.

Spring and summer will give me plenty of subject material for my flower photos. I took this picture today of a neighbor’s cholla cactus. We also have cholla blooming on the upper lot, but it’s a bit of a climb to get up there with my camera. We have some cholla on the lower lot too, but they flower later in the summer. Click on the image to enlarge.

This is a hedgehog cactus clump located up near the north property line behind our house. This is the largest of several in that area and it is currently flowering as you can see from the image Damsel took a couple of days ago. Click on the image to enlarge.

This cactus and the others in the area are not visible from the lower level of the lot where the house is located and can only be seen after a moderately difficult climb. There are also lots of trees, cholla, creosote and other shrubs and cacti that make access difficult but not impossible.

We would like to move one or more of the hedgehogs to the lower lot, so we did some research on moving native cacti. Arizona law protects native cacti from randomly being removed and transplanted, but it allows us to remove or transplant on our own property without going through the process of getting permission to do so.

The cactus in the image will be too large for us to manage digging it up and moving it, but there is a smaller clump near the property line just behind the palo verde whose base can be seen in the upper center of the image. That cactus is similar in size to this hedgehog cactus which has been properly tagged per state permit process. We plan to move it sometime in June when conditions are said to be optimum for transplanting cacti in Arizona.