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Updated: May 26, 2025
Owing to the lack of information respecting the conditions under which many of the Cactuses are found wild, and to the fact that little in the way of experimental culture has been done by growers of this family, cultivators are sometimes in the dark as regards the lowest temperature in which the rarer kinds can be safely grown.
The shattered and baked rocks, traversed by innumerable dikes of greenstone, showed what commotions had formerly taken place. The scenery was much the same as that near the Bell of Quillota dry barren mountains, dotted at intervals by bushes with a scanty foliage. The cactuses, or rather opuntias, were here very numerous.
I need hardly say that, as a matter of plain historical fact, neither cactuses nor agaves were known in Europe till long after Christopher Columbus had steered his wandering bark to the sandy shores of Cat's Island in the Bahamas.
This little plant obtains its name from the rich golden-yellow of its stellate clusters of spines, which are arranged thickly on the tips of the small, pointed tubercles. It belongs to the group called Thimble Cactuses, of which it is one of the prettiest. The stems are tufted, branching freely at the base, and rising to a height of about 2 in.
This applies also to some of the small islands of the West Indies, the hills or mountains of which are crowned with these curious-looking plants, whose singular shapes are alone sufficient to remind the traveller that he has reached an American coast; for these Cactuses are as peculiar a feature of the New World as the Heaths are in the Old, or as Eucalypti are in Australia.
From accounts of it in its native haunts, it will, however, probably prefer a cool house in winter, and as much sun and warmth as possible in spring and summer; for we are told that during winter it is often subjected to severe frosts and heavy snowfalls, whilst in summer the fierce heat of the sun is such as to burn up all vegetation, except Cactuses and other similar plants.
Like rain, it falls on the just and on the unjust; it ruins and it revives; it quenches thirst; it makes the desert bloom with cactuses and grotesque flowers, and it beats down violets and drowns little birds in their nests. Gossip was now awakening a new and fearful interest in Charity Coe and Jim Dyckman.
Cactuses may be multiplied from cuttings of the stems, from seeds, and also by means of grafting; this last method being adopted for those species which, under cultivation, are not easily kept in health when growing upon their own roots, or, as in the case of Epiphyllums, when it offers a means of speedily forming large and shapely specimens.
It is to the management of Cactuses in a small state, such as is most convenient for our plant-houses, and not to the cultivation of those colossal species referred to above, that the instructions given here will be for the most part devoted; but, as in the case of almost every one of our cultivated plants, it is important to the cultivator to know something of the conditions which Nature has provided for Cactuses in those lands where they are native.
The palm-trees, the scitamineae, the malvaceae, the trees with pinnate leaves, do not all display the same picturesque beauties; and generally the most beautiful species of each type, in plants as in animals, belong to the equinoctial zone. It is, however, the shade and humidity, rather than the distance from the coast, which oppose the migration of the cactuses southward.
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