Los Alamos, NM

[mg2007]

I am not sure this is the right forum but nothing else seems right.. some observations I made a number of years ago may be of interest. A number of years ago I lived at Los Alamos, NM and to entertain myself would go looking for cacti in the surrounding area - not to collect them, just to see them in habitat.

Los Alamos and the surrounding area are on what geologists call welded tuff - volcanic ash now consolidated into rock. Some areas are bare, others have a thin layer of topsoil with clumps of what is called grama gras. There are also pine trees, the well known pinons. Theer are several "pincushions" cacti; I was not enough of a cactus pundit at the time to ID them well, but I am pretty sure the large ones were Echinocereus coccineus and the smaller ones were some species of Coryphantha or maybe an Escobaria. I quickly learned that To locate the larger ones I would find fractures in the rock, then look under shrubs or trees; they apparently needed these "nurse" plants, at least when they were younger. Later on, I read that this indeed was the case.

The smaller species were also fairly easy to find; Unlike the Echinocereus, which was pretty much in areas of bare rock, they were in meadow-like areas or even in the thin forests. However, all I had to do was look for straight lines of the clumps of grama grass; these indicated fractures in the bedrock, along which there was more access to moisture than in the surrounding rock. The cacti were almost always within the clumps of grass.

Speaking of the grama grass clumps, in a nearby area, they hid another species of cactus -Toumeya papyracantha, whose spines greatly resemble the blades of that grass. I was told of a field where there where at least a thousand cacti of that species; my wife and I spent an hour on our hands and knees there. She found one, I found none! That is how good their camouflage is.

I have always found it valuable to know the natural habitat of a plant I want to cultivate. In this case, the lesson learned was that these plants like to have a bit of moisture more or less constantly at their roots, even if the heads stay dry. On the other hand, they do not require bright, glaring full sun to stay happy.