Flowering cacti pop with polka dots of color
Springtime in the desert can sometimes be downright spectacular, particularly after wetter-than-normal winters, when Mexican gold poppies blanket foothill slopes. Even when conditions have been considerably dryer, however, with far fewer spring wildflowers sending up blooms, many of our native cacti will still put on a colorful show as they unfurl their short-lived but sumptuous blossoms.
Among the showiest of these early bloomers are the hedgehog cacti, so dubbed because their spiny clumps of many stems, when not in bloom, closely resemble those funny-looking creatures. This group of cacti, with the botanical name Echinocereus, can be further divided into subgroups that include rainbow cacti and claret cup cacti, and nearly all of them flower in mid spring.
Commonly encountered locally are three kinds of rainbow cactus, which are small hedgehog cacti characterized by pastel bands of color around their stems. Texas rainbow, with its large, pale yellow flowers, and New Mexico rainbow, with petite green- and white-striped flowers, are often seen along desert trails. Less common is Arizona rainbow, a tiny hedgehog cactus with clear pink flowers, and just beyond our area and southward into Mexico is another rainbow cactus that richly deserves its moniker, with bolder pink and purple bands of color that make it showy year-round even without the large pink flowers it displays this time of year.
Another relatively small hedgehog cactus native to most of New Mexico and Arizona is Fendler’s hedgehog, which is fairly plain-looking most of the time and might easily be overlooked except in spring, when its extravagantly large, deep pink flowers appear. On a recent hike in the Robledo Mountains, I was twice stopped in my tracks to admire a couple of blooming plants we encountered along the trail – the first an eye-popping cluster of magenta blooms and the second one a single stem topped with a sigh-inducing pink flower that was larger than its girth. These head-turning beauties may not grow into impressively-sized clumps but their spectacular blossoms more than make up for their smaller stature.
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In the vicinity of “A” Mountain one might encounter one of the larger and showier members of the group, the strawberry hedgehog or haystack cactus. Its extra-spiny clumps of stems, which indeed resemble a messy haystack, sport deep purple flowers that will be followed by tasty, strawberry-like fruits.
My personal favorite and perhaps the most striking of all the hedgehogs are the claret cup cacti, which can grow to a couple feet in diameter with dozens of stems. Whether in their natural desert haunts or planted in landscapes, their huge, deep orange to red blossoms are veritable head-turners. Cranking out enormous quantities of sugary nectar during the few weeks that they are in bloom, they are extremely important to breeding and migrating hummingbirds and unlike most cacti they depend heavily upon hummingbirds for pollination. Large clumps of blooming claret cup cacti on desert slopes are an irresistible beacon to hummingbirds passing through, and the enchanting flowers are visited by butterflies, bees, and many other small insects as well.
As temperatures climb, the flowers will begin to wither and the yearly spring spectacle will draw to a close, so if you haven’t yet experienced the delight that these colorful cacti can bring, take the opportunity to amble along a desert trail, while these beauties are still doing their thing.
Marcy Scott is a local birder, botanizer, and author of "Hummingbird Plants of the Southwest." Along with her husband, Jimmy Zabriskie, she operates Robledo Vista Nursery in the North Valley, www.robledovista.com, specializing in native and adapted plants for birds and wildlife habitat. She can be reached at HummingbirdPlantsSW@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Las Cruces Sun-News: Flowering cacti pop with polka dots of color
