ATTACKED BY A
CHRISTMAS CACTUS
Wandering through the scrub, an odd sensation on
the back of my right leg caught my attention. It was as if suddenly I'd developed some
flab there and my walking was causing the flab to flop back and forth. I twisted around
and looked down at the back of my leg and saw the heart-palpitating sight you can behold
yourself below:
That picture shows four stem sections of a Christmas Cactus, CYLINDROPUNTIA
LEPTOCAULIS, adhering to my body by their spines, one stuck to the shorts' pocket in which
I carry my old birding field-guide, the other three very securely attached to the skin on
the back of my leg. I can't account for my having been able to feel the cactus sections
swinging back and forth, but not the spines stuck into my flesh. Well, you can see from my
red, scratched and dirty legs that they'd been through a bit scrambling about the arroyos,
so maybe they were just beyond feeling sharp sensations. However, when I extracted the
spines -- and each section was attached by two or more well anchored ones -- I certainly
felt that!
I backtracked and photographed what may have been my five-ft-tall, much branched donor
cactus, and you can see that below:
I can hear some folks shaking their heads now saying that what's shown in that picture
doesn't look anything like a Christmas Cactus, thinking that a Christmas Cactus is one of
those benign little flat-stemmed cacti sold in pots, and which produce pretty, red flowers
around Christmas time. Well, several cacti go by the name of Christmas Cactus and this is
one of them. But neither does the plant in my picture look very Christmassy. I've seen the
species when it did, however -- when it was fruiting. The fruits are bright red, so on
green stems they can look as Christmassy as anything. Sometimes English speakers also call
this cactus by one of its Spanish names, Tasajillo. You can see both the species' flowers
and fruits at http://www.fireflyforest.com/flowers/others/other02.html.
This is a common cactus extending from our northern Mexican uplands into Arizona, New
Mexico, Texas and even Oklahoma. At the base of its spines appear dense tufts of very
fine, sharp glochids, which I've told you enough about, and I got plenty of those while
unsticking myself from the joints on the back of my leg. |