Cactus Culture For Amateurs | Page 5

leaves. These, however, soon wither and fall off, so that, to all
appearance, leaves are never present on these plants. There is one
exception, however, in the Barbadoes Gooseberry (Pereskia), which
bears true and persistent leaves; but these may be considered
anomalous in the order.
The term "succulent" is applied to Cactuses because of the large
proportion of cellular tissue, i.e., flesh, of their stems, as compared with
the woody portion. In some of them, when young, the woody system
appears to be altogether absent, and they have the appearance of a mass
of fleshy matter, like a vegetable marrow. This succulent mass is
protected by a tough skin, often of leather-like firmness, and almost
without the little perforations called breathing and evaporating pores,
which in other plants are very numerous. This enables the Cactuses to
sustain without suffering the full ardour of the burning sun and
parched-up nature of the soil peculiar to the countries where they are

native. Nature has endowed Cactuses with a skin similar to what she
clothes many succulent fruits with, such as the Apple, Plum, Peach, &c.,
to which the sun's powerful rays are necessary for their growth and
ripening.
The spiny coat of the majority of Cactuses is no doubt intended to serve
as a protection from the wild animals inhabiting with them the sterile
plains of America, and to whom the cool watery flesh of the Cactus
would otherwise fall a prey. Indeed, these spines are not sufficient to
prevent some animals from obtaining the watery insides of these plants,
for we read that mules and wild horses kick them open and greedily
devour their succulent flesh. It has also been suggested that the spines
are intended to serve the plants as a sort of shade from the powerful
sunshine, as they often spread over and interlace about the stems.

CHAPTER III
.
CULTIVATION.
By noting the conditions in which plants are found growing in a natural
state, we obtain some clue to their successful management, when
placed under conditions more or less artificial; and, in the case of
Cactuses, knowledge of this kind is of more than ordinary importance.
In the knowledge that, with only one or two exceptions, they will not
exist in any but sunny lands, where, during the greater part of the year,
dry weather prevails, we perceive what conditions are likely to suit
them when under cultivation in our plant-houses.
Cactuses are all American (using this term for the whole of the New
World) with only one or two exceptions (several species of Rhipsalis
have been found wild in Africa, Madagascar, and Ceylon), and, broadly
speaking, they are mostly tropical plants, not-withstanding the fact of
their extending to the snow-line on some of the Andean Mountains of
Chili, where several species of the Hedgehog Cactus were found by
Humboldt on the summit of rocks whose bases were planted in snow.
In California, in Mexico and Texas, in the provinces of Central and
South America, as far south as Chili, and in many of the islands
contiguous to the mainland, the Cactus family has become established
wherever warmth and drought, such as its members delight in, allowed

them to get established. In many of the coast lands, they occur in very
large numbers, forming forests of strange aspect, and giving to the
landscape a weird, picturesque appearance. Humboldt, in his "Views of
Nature," says: "There is hardly any physiognomical character of exotic
vegetation that produces a more singular and ineffaceable impression
on the mind of the traveller than an arid plain, densely covered with
columnar or candelabra-like stems of Cactuses, similar to those near
Cumana, New Barcelona, Cora. and in the province of Jaen de
Bracamoros." 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.
Although the Cactus order is, in its distribution by Nature, limited to
the regions of America, yet it is now represented in various parts of the
Old World by plants which are apparently as wild and as much at home
as when in their native countries.
The Indian Figs are, perhaps, the most widely distributed of Cactuses in
the Old World-a circumstance due to their having been introduced for
the sake of their edible fruits, and more especially for the cultivation of
the cochineal insect. In various places along the shores of the
Mediterranean, and in South Africa, and even in Australia, the Opuntias
have become naturalised, and appear like aboriginal inhabitants. It is,
however, only