DO YOU LOVE YOUR NEIGHBORS?

Low fingers of sunlight reach out from the East, the birds up and sing, and the desert becomes a spectacular landscape full of mysterious neighbors you should know and love. Walk there alone! It is a spiritual experience. Wear stout garments and leave all pettiness behind. It is no place for frills and foibles, but a wide honest space under a wide honest sky-the shrine of long thoughts. Strangers ask questions, old timers keep silent, which is, after all, the only way to listen in and understand.

So long has the desert battled for the life of her children that they cannot be approached flippantly; she has armed them all to fight, trained them to turn and twist amazingly to outwit their enemies, and forced them to concentrate solely on their century-slow struggle to survive. No wonder that she has had no time to teach them to make friends gracefully. So do not misjudge them. In all the plant world the Cactus Family is the most remarkable for its ingenuity, its steadfastness, and its courage. Re member all this when you go among them.

Attitude. No one can bring them to you. No one can tell you the tough trails you must take to find them. Let your best self listen, feel, and think. You will be rewarded if you are that kind of person.

But if it is only facts you want, they are more easily come by. For instance, one-tenth of all cactus on the face of the earth grows within the boundaries of Arizona. Dean Thornber, of the University of Arizona, states in his invaluable book, "The Fantastic Clan," that "All told, there are more than 1200 species or kinds of cacti, of which about 225 occur in the United States, and the rest in Mexico, Central America, South America and outlying islands. Of the 225 species occuring in the United States, about one hundred are native of Arizona, the premier cactus state, and nearly two hundred grow in the four Southwestern states, California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, with a few in Nevada and Utah. Our four Southwestern states together with Mexico constitute the great cactus area of the world, not alone in numbers but in variety and weirdness of type, containing many of the most peculiar and fantastic forms of these grotesque plants."

Their struggle to get water and to conserve it may be blamed for the characteristic appearance of the vast Cactus family, but maybe the botanist should be blamed a little also. They came this way inflated with their binomial system of naming plants and made our cacti (cactuses, if you prefer) their most horrible example. An Opuntia Bigelovii will be that little blond Cholla or Choya waiting to bite your foot and turn the pit of your stomach to ice-but can you blame it?

JANUARY, 1938

In many massive volumes the hundreds of cacti are listed, but the Smiths, Browns, and Johnsons of the lot seem to be the families. Opuntia, Cereus, and Mammillaria, each having many, many kinsfolk.

Opuntia was the name of a town in Greece where a fine lot of fat, hairy, lazy cacti grew. Opuntiae do not stand up straight and tall, but most often branch from the base; spread out, clamber, but never climb; roots, fibrous or woody; bear spines, barbed bristles, hairs, flowers, fruit, and a sort of leaf. The flowers are of many shades, some varieties bear many colors on one plant. The commonly known Opuntiae number about two hundred and fifty species, but several times this many have been found. They are the cactus Smiths, no doubt about that. Our Prickly Pear belongs to this family and our Cholla.

The name Cereus is from the Greek and Latin, signifying torch, and was used by Tabernaemontanus in his Kreuter-buck, published in 1625. Cereus Giganteous, our own Saguaro, was not described scientifically until 1848, but we know it belongs to one of the first families and was known to the missionaries who came this way in 1540. Saguaro is a pet name with no distinguished ancient root. The Spanish soldiers heard the Papago Indians speak of their "friends" and the sound of the Papago word for friend was given by them their own nearest Spanish spelling and became Saguaro.

ARIZONA HIGHWAYS

A few of the characteristics by which members of the Cereus group may be recognized are their stems or trunks, upright and commandingly tall, strongly angled and ribbed; their areolas, spiny and more or less short, wooly, but never producing hairs; their flowers, nocturnal, elongated and funnel-shaped; fruit, fleshy and red, often edible.

Mammillaria is from the word mammilla, a nipple, referring to the tubercles or knots on the plant. These are the smallest of all in the great Cactus family, our lovely little Pincushions and all their cousins. The flowers are day-blooming, opening and closing with surprising rapidity, but continuing with a succession of blooms for a long period.

Of course, the Smiths, Browns, and Johnsons fail by a long way to fill the desert directory. Take the Visnaga or Bisnaga, meaning barrel, and commonly called the Barrel cactus. Science gives him the name Echinocactus---echinos, meaning "hedge hog," and kaktos, a "kind of spiny plant." We have about forty species in the lower Sonora zone, but the group as a whole reaches about 140 species. The one we know best is the Echinocactus Wislizeni,, our now Candy Barrel cactus, the rain barrel of the desert, upside down, of course, and filled from the bottom. It would be. Success in the wide-sown lands depend on being original and adaptable and the Bisnaga must be classed as eminently successful, since it manages, in spite of all the odds against it, to store up water enough to look fat to befriend travellers even in the direst drought.

Johnsons fail by a long way to fill the desert directory. Take the Visnaga or Bisnaga, meaning barrel, and commonly called the Barrel cactus. Science gives him the name Echinocactus---echinos, meaning "hedge hog," and kaktos, a "kind of spiny plant." We have about forty species in the lower Sonora zone, but the group as a whole reaches about 140 species. The one we know best is the Echinocactus Wislizeni,, our now Candy Barrel cactus, the rain barrel of the desert, upside down, of course, and filled from the bottom. It would be. Success in the wide-sown lands depend on being original and adaptable and the Bisnaga must be classed as eminently successful, since it manages, in spite of all the odds against it, to store up water enough to look fat to befriend travellers even in the direst drought.

A stranger often mistakes a Bisnaga for a young Saguaro, and it is true that a two foot Candy Barrel and a thirtytwo year old baby giant do resemble. Both are fluted and columnar, but the Bisnaga is a darker green, more portly, more deeply grooved and much more elaborately enmeshed in a veil of long reddish-purple re-curving spines. These spines have the distinction of being the longest that grow in Arizona.

In stringing along a few facts about our desert neighbors in this manner, it is a temptation to pause here and there for a bit of gossip. The strong personalities encountered in the widely differing members of the strange world of Cactaceae fascinate even a casual visitor. The dignity they bring to their desperate struggle to survive, their (Continued on Page 23)