January 17, 2013 Beautiful Cactus

Today we celebrated the (slightly) warmer weather by going sight-seeing.  Dale and Heidi drove Clyde, Nancy, Randy and myself to the Desert Botanical Garden.  

It's amazing how many cactus they have there - we spent at least 4 hours walking through it, I took almost 300 pictures, and I'm sure we didn't see everything.  It's hard to know what to post!  But I'll start by saying some of them were HUGE - just how big can a Saguaro cactus get, anyway?

I discovered that I really like little cactus, too.  For example, this little thing is just about the size of a baseball and looks like a sea urchin.  The spines are bigger than the actual cactus!  I'm sure it's as painful as a sea urchin, too, but for once I did not touch.

And these cacti look like sea anemones, right down to the way they all bend in the same direction as if they are in a flowing current.

They have Chain Fruit Cholla, Creeping Devil and Bunny Ears Prickly Pears; big, beautiful Golden Barrel and purple Lady Fingers.  They have something called a Boojum tree, and Old Man cactus, which is covered with wispy white hair.

This one . . . it has a nice long Latin name - Mammillaris geminispina - but to me it looks like a mass of fat worms squirming together in a ball.  I wasn't even slightly tempted to touch this.

This one got my vote as the most "do not fall on this" cactus.

They have some interpretive signs along the pathways and a lady who talked about the local birds.  From these I learned that Saguaros often grows under Palo Verde trees from seeds dropped by birds, and that hummingbird eggs are just a little bigger than an aspirin.  Unfortunately they don't have labels for all of the plants.  So when we found a cactus tree with a lot of soft white airborne seeds on it, we don't know what relationship they have to the cactus.  But they are beautiful, anyway.

Saguaro, of course, are everywhere.  This classic cactus stands tall in every Western film.  In real life, however, sometimes they like to get a little creative, and things can end up looking like this:

Inside a saguaro, under the thick green skin, is a skeleton of wood to hold up all that weight.  When the cactus dies, the green part rots away but the skeleton remains.  And it looks really cool.  The Cactus Garden has a complete one, which is fairly unusual. We would love to have make off with it but we couldn't figure out how to smuggle it out under our jackets.  What a shame!  

In my opinion, this was probably the prettiest cactus in the park.  It's a little smaller than a volleyball and the spines look like small pink flowers.

For lunch we went to the Garden's cafe.  They have a small menu of reasonable food and a lot of outside seating.  There were not a lot of people here today but considering how bold the local critters are, this must be a popular place.  In addition to the usual assortment of small birds and ground squirrels asking for handouts, they also have a flock of almost-tame quails and one Roadrunner.  There was one little sign that suggested we not feed the animals, and of course we all followed that suggestion.