spring cacti flowers

another pic;

one of my freaks flowered:


with plenty more to come!
it is a Mammillaria spinosissima fma. monstrose cultivar 'Un Pico' fma. cristata. (try saying that 5 times as fast as you can .. its a good one to confuse the hell out of the laymen with).

More! Please!

....Awesome photos

Nice shots Lewis, I can't wait to see your collection in the full.
I dunno about those lophy turb pics, don't get me wrong they are really nice plants. but to be honest the flowers aren't that showy.
I forgot to bring my camera to the interent cafe, so you'll all have to wait. I have heaps of photos of flowering plants. I'll upload em to the gallery next chance i get.

Yeh not really big and showy, more fragile and precious , kinda like the flowers on my haworthia, tiny but beautiful. ill try get a pic later but most dont turn out as the flower is so small and my camera is so crap.

Quote :

it is a Mammillaria spinosissima fma. monstrose cultivar 'Un Pico' fma. cristata

Is that the plant you found at CC?
I can see it looks like its starting to form a crest but where does the monstrose bit come into it lewis?? Wouldn't it just be fma cristata like most cristrate plants are referred to, i thought cristation was a recognised form of monstrosity and therefore no need to call it blah blah blah fma monstrose fma cristata. Just seems like a bit of a mouthful and unnecessary really

haha PD don't be so fast to jump to conclusions. you see, Un pico is precisely the monstrose form of Mammillaira spinosissima. it was just given a cultivar name to make i sound cuter and more laymen friendly. this also helps to sell it buy the hundred. 'monstrose' isn't the nicest sounding word eh. .... just like Mammillaria bocasana monstrose is called FRED (after the guy who discovered it and whom hopefully didn't bear a resemblace to it).
p.s cresting is a completely different type of growth mutation to monstrose growth in the accpeted sense (yes cresting is and can be considered to be a form of monstrose but is also termed fasciated.

So it would be M. spinosissima "uno pico" fma cristata, if uno pico is the recognised monstrose form then there is no need for "monstrosus" in the description at all.

You see where im comin from?

okay, yes PD i get ya.
time for some Echinocereus knippelianus action:


is it just me or are the flowers a tad less pink than the norm.?

Lil Haworthia for ya Prier

Quote :

p.s cresting is a completely different type of growth mutation to monstrose growth in the accpeted sense

yes iam aware of that lewis

Sometimes communicating here can be hard.

Its not much of a monstrose really i mean how does reducing spine numbers to a singular add up to being monstrose, i guess like you said, the ppl breeding these things wanna sell em by the million, wack a nice lil variety name on a sport and away you go. I guess im used to seeing monstrose as a gnarly twisted almost unrecognisable form of the original, there i go again, using my mental images to get me in trouble sheesh.



hehe, sometimes i think you just like using big words lewis

Nice Haworthia.

PD wrote:

Its not much of a monstrose really i mean how does reducing spine numbers to a singular add up to being monstrose, i guess like you said, the ppl breeding these things wanna sell em by the million, wack a nice lil variety name on a sport and away you go. I guess im used to seeing monstrose as a gnarly twisted almost unrecognisable form of the original, there i go again, using my mental images to get me in trouble sheesh.

You would be surprised by what may be termed monstrose. it can be anything really. 'monstrose' is just a broad encompassing term for any atypical mutated growth differing in some way from what is typical of a species. it can be ANY form of unusual growth that spontaneously appears on a specimen. it is not known what causes it, theories ranging from viral infections to hormonal abnormalities to radiation and excessive fertilizer have been proposed, none proven. it is known, however that grafting cacti and pushing them very hard can increase the chance of monstrose or crested growwth appearing. so rapid growth acceleration may play a part in some cases. anyway this growth may take the form of less spines, more spines, completely lacking spines, more wool, less wool, unusual growth tips, distorted ribs/tubercle structure, cresting, rapid offsetting (assuming it is unusual for the species), repetitive dichotomous branching, many heads arrising from one (as in some 'polytomic' monstrose cacti) flowering for the top of a tubercle in mammillarias, producing distorted flowers... anything really. many cultivars of cacti can be considered monstrose. many Astrophytum cultivars included. in EXTREME cases (eg. in FRED) the growth is completely distorted and unrecogniseable as being the species (in this case Mammillaria bocasana). reproduction may also be affected with the specimen incapable of setting viable seed, producing only deformed flowers or being completely unable to produce the required naughty bits.

'Un Pico' can therefore be considered monstrose on the basis of its single long spine per tubercle. although in some cases on a stable plant there may be none to several. also sometimes on the completely spineless tubercles there is a tiny green thing coming out of the areoles (..don't know the technical term for that). It is also, or should i say some specimens, prone to reversion to normal M.spinosissima growth with many spines suddenly for no apparent reason. interestingly, this mutation is able to be transmitted genetically, and so it is produced commerically by the thousand. apparently most seedlings will revert back to normal M.spinosissima but some will be 'Un Pico'. quite remarkable for a mutation. this also explains the massive variation amongst the plants labelled as 'Un Pico' commercially, often ranging from near spineless to near normal spinosissima but with slightly less spines.

So un pico is a sport that can be reproduced by seed? That is interesting lewis, sort of takes away from tha mutant part a bit though for my liking.

Quote :

there is a tiny green thing coming out of the areoles

Wouldnt be the vestigial leaves would it?


Thanks for the detailed description lewis, hope you arent too bored on the school holidays mate

the only other monstrose form of a cactus i can think of that is capable of being transmitted genetically via seeds is Cereus peruvianus monstrose. seed from this is supposed to result in 50%+ monstrose seedlings. (yes, CPM's do flower ocassionally, usually on a reverted rib)
re: vestigial leaves: googled it but not sure mate.

PD wrote:

Thanks for the detailed description lewis, hope you arent too bored on the school holidays mate

oh, was it that obvious?

lewis wrote:

is it just me or are the flowers a tad less pink than the norm.?

I just found the answer as to why; it's actually an Echinocereus knippelianus v.kruegeri.

Now if only you could cross that one with the monstrose FRED clone. Be something like Mammilocereus bocalianus X FRED Krueger!!! Be like Nightmare on Cactus street: The Mother in Laws Cushion or something... Oh yeah!! That's freakin' gold!!!

Omg Trig that is hilarious, now when are one of you experts gunna do it?

Just to add to what Lewis said about the Un Pico, some being nearly completely spineless, i have noticed with myne, i can just knock the spines and theyre gone, so perhaps the spineless ones are just shipping accidents?

more from today:

Gymnocalycium bruchii



the aptly named Echinocereus viridiflorus (literally, 'green flower'):
very nice strong lemon scent!


and i saved the best for last. This is an Echinocereus laui that ONLY PRODUCES CRESTED FLOWERS!:






(all flowers it has ever had have been crested.. and the other 3 buds for this year are also crested)
i love it!
unusual for this species it has never produced an offset so thus far i have been unable to propagate vegetatively, i assume offsets would also have crested flowers. i should lop off the top, graft it, make it go crazy, then detach all the offsets produced by the base and make my own cultivar!

Very nice lewis. I've got a heap of shots too just no time to up them. Hope I can get them up soon.

Here is my flowering cactus I saw last week. I am away from home now. I think I can see more flowers when I came home.

Astrophytum asterias cv super kabuto, grafted

Astrophytum asterias cv hanazono kabuto, degrafted own root

Astrophytum myriostigma

Discocactus heptacanthus v griseus, grafted

Mammillaria senilis v albiflora, sown seed on 02/09/07 grafted, 1st flowering of this plant

Mammillaria herrerae, grafted

Mammillaria luethyi, a short grafting stock remained and in soil
Just start flowering I think I can see more flowes next week.

Nice crested flowers Lewis, did you know it had them before you got it?

Awsome Han! Wanna trade my SkxCap and Hakuun for your measly hanazono

MichaelCactus wrote:

Nice crested flowers Lewis, did you know it had them before you got it?

No.. it was a nice surprise!

I posted a few photos here a few weeks ago, they appear to be gone
I think they were still here after the major post losses a few weeks ago.
I will post again when i have time.

[EDIT] oops, i posted in another thread. all good.

I have a flower coming on for the first time for this cactus. It was labeled Trichocereus camarguensis when i bought it 3 years ago. It has a really deep red flower bud and the pictures ive found on the net show a green bud with white flowers. The column certainly looks like a Trichocereus camarguensis but can anyone help as to why the flower bud is red? I can't wait to see the whole flower!












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Also, does anyone else have loads of trouble when inserting pictures into posts? No matter where the cursor is when i add an image to a post, it puts the picture at the top and sometimes i lose the first few words of text, and have to reformat and move everything around