Cactus Rescue

By Eilene Lyon

Our rural dirt road is bounded on the east by steep shale and sandstone slopes prone to erosion. Last week we had several torrential rains that swept water and mud across the road, leaving piles of debris and cutting new gullies down toward the river below.

I would not want to be walking down the road when one of these bad-boy boulders tumbles down. This one and two others nearby came down in just the last year or so.

While walking the dogs a couple days ago, I saw a claret-cup (Echinocereus triglochidiatus), a type of hedgehog cactus, had been washed down from a nearby undeveloped parcel and lay mostly buried in mud. It had just missed getting run over and would surely be squashed later by the garbage trucks.

Immense amounts of water and mud came down from the property to the right, leaving several inches of muck. I found the cactus (pictured at the bottom of the post) buried in the debris on the left side of the photo.

We have a lovely claret-cup cactus on our property, but in a hidden spot (feature image). I transplanted the rescue in a spot where we can enjoy it from our kitchen window. I hope it will do well in its new home.

We actually have a variety of cacti on our property, all naturally occurring.

New Mexican prickly pear (Opuntia phaeacantha) …

This prickly pear has pale yellow flowers in early summer, which have now become fruit.

Whipple’s cholla (Cylindropuntia whipplei) …

This is the largest of the chollas on the property. It rarely blooms, but we did get some yellow blossoms this year. The yellowish tip are new stem growths.

and Beehive cactus (Escobaria vivipara) …

These cacti have nearly magenta pink blossoms. Most grow in clusters like this.

The cactus I rescued has limbs all akimbo. I think it must have been growing precariously on a rock near the top of the cliff. Contrast this with the feature image of our other claret cup, which bloomed earlier this summer.

The rescued claret-cup cactus, now in my back yard. It’s had a rough life!

56 thoughts on “Cactus Rescue”

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  3. It’s very tricky working around cacti. The thorns will penetrate every glove I own and sometimes they are so tiny as to be invisible but still annoying. Best to keep one’s distance! Thanks for rescuing that claret cup, Eilene. I hope it survives.

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  4. This took me right back to our years of living in AZ. Back then, when the CAP was being dug they put the displaced cactus up for adoption. We adopted a variety for our backyard: teddy bear cholla, ocotillo, golden barrel, and pincushion. Thanks for rescuing and sharing.

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    1. That’s really cool that they saved those! I’d be pretty leery of a teddy bear cholla, though. I was hiking up a mountain by Saguaro Lake near Mesa and put my hand on a chunk of cholla lying on the ground. Incredibly painful. Took pliers to remove it and the tips of the spines were in my fingers for at least a year.

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  6. Does this mean we should call you the Cactus Lady? 🙂 Love to see the pictures of how diverse the area is. Rural is perhaps even a bit mild as a descriptive! Verging on remote I think 😉

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      1. LOL!! That is the beauty of living where you do. Deceiving to the eye without knowing the larger context, just quiet and removed enough, but still within emergency distance if needed!

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  14. Prickly Pear keeps popping up in our AZ yard and I diligently unearth them and put them in the garbage! I’m quite happy to admire them in other people’s yards but do not want anything to do with their spines in my own yard!

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  15. Good luck with the transplant Eilene. My mom had cactus gardens for years, two long planters, that took up the entire kitchen windowsill. She lost one of her Old Man cacti after it deflated and withered up, so I went to the nursery to buy her another one. She segregated it from the others, in another room, then transferred it into the garden to replace the one that died. Well it had a disease, mites I think and within a week she lost all the cacti in both gardens. I felt badly as she enjoyed those gardens. As to prickly spines, Mom was short and had to lean over the sink when watering them. Her forearm grazed a cactus with spines and a long spine embedded itself in her arm. We could not remove it with tweezers and it required a trip to the doctor to have it removed and a round of strong antibiotics afterward. My mom had cellulitis in her legs and any break in the skin could cause a flare-up.

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    1. That’s such a shame about her cactus garden! I have the problem of a virus that attacks my tomato plants. I’m about to abandon the effort to grow them entirely. The cactus spines really can be a terrible aggravation. Prickly pear glochids are nearly invisible and drive you mad.

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      1. I felt so badly Eilene – she had them for years. I don’t understand why the mites never showed up until she introduced that cactus to her gardens. I bought her a book on cacti as she was so into them. Do be careful with the spines. This was not the entire spine, just a large tip that broke off and embedded itself in her forearm. I know the tomato virus can be frustrating. Many years ago I had Golden Euonymous bushes in my garden. Every so often one got growths on it that resembled a cauliflower. It was a “gall” they said at the nursery and they said to cut out the growth and apply alcohol on the plant and wrap it with cheesecloth until the “wound” grew over.

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      3. I’m not good with houseplants either and I can’t keep a poinsettia as I kill them before Christmas arrives. The Euonymous survived and has gone to live many more years. In trying to decide what to do with the backyard after the fire burned 1/4 of the yard and I’ve had the burned debris cleared and two trees taken down, I am leaning more and more toward just getting the backyard sodded and keep it as simple as possible. The weather is too erratic to worry about plants getting “wet feet” from torrential rain or very cold Springs or drought like we had for three weeks in June. My previous garden, lost to the Polar Vortex of 2013-2014 was put in and maintained by me, but those were much younger legs, some 39 years ago.

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      5. I like that idea Eilene – it is a relatively small backyard due to the perimeter gardens I made decades ago. I would like to recreate the pollinator garden I had years ago. This morning I was excited to see a female Goldfinch in my backyard (while checking to see if the groundhog entered the trap yet … the goldfinch balanced out this groundhog debacle).

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      7. Thank you for sending this Eilene. I have saved it – hopefully, it’s not just a one-time-read article from the NYT as you are a subscriber. I have a free account because I would hate starting to read a story and then I am unable to read the rest of it..

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      9. It worked well and I saved it. Now that the two trees are gone, the grass is much better back there, but there are huge areas with weeds which I never had before and the back garden is all gone due to the fire … the pollinator garden would work well back there.

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  16. You will have to keep us updated on your rescue’s progress! Oddly enough, my dad has some kind of hardy cactus in his yard here in Ohio. It blooms yellow but I don’t know what it is. Otherwise, I have to trek to the Franklin Park Conservatory to see these beauties!

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Eilene Lyon

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