Cactus Culture For Amateurs | Page 5

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
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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 in warm sunny regions that the naturalisation of these plants is possible.
From these facts, we are able to form some general idea of the conditions suitable for Cactuses when cultivated in our greenhouses; for, although we seldom have, or care to have, any but diminutive specimens of many of these plants as compared with their appearance when wild, yet we know that the same conditions as regards heat, light, and moisture are necessary for small Cactuses as for full-grown ones.
Although the places in which Cactuses naturally abound are, for the greater portion of the year, very