Reproduction of the original: Cactus Culture by W. Watson

The saguaro, with its great size and characteristic shape—its arms stretching heavenward, its silhouette often resembling a human—has become the emblem of the Sonoran Desert of southwestern Arizona and northwestern Mexico. The largest and tallest cactus in the United States, it is both familiar and an object of fascination and curiosity. This book offers a complete natural history of this enduring and iconic desert plant. Gathering everything from the saguaro’s role in Sonoran Desert ecology to its adaptations to the desert climate and its sacred place in Indigenous culture, this book shares precolonial through current scientific findings. The saguaro is charismatic and readily accessible but also decidedly different from other desert flora. The essays in this book bear witness to our ongoing fascination with the great cactus and the plant’s unusual characteristics, covering the saguaro’s: history of discovery, place in the cactus family, ecology, anatomy and physiology, genetics, and ethnobotany. The Saguaro Cactus offers testimony to the cactus’s prominence as a symbol, the perceptions it inspires, its role in human society, and its importance in desert ecology.

Table of Contents Introduction Introduction to Succulents The General Cultivation of Succulents and Cacti Temperature Air and Light Watering Soil Planting Your Succulents Growth from leaves Growing Your Plants through Cuttings Repotting and replanting Growing succulents through offsets Saving Your Cacti from Pests and Diseases Aphids Mealy bugs Thrips Red spiders Conclusion Author Bio Publisher Introduction The moment you hear the word “cactus,” you immediately visualize an arid desert, with the poor lonesome cowboy riding away into the sunset on his trusty horse, singing “I am far away from home,” with a buzzard eyeing him greedily, and a cactus somewhere in the background, looming over him. If you have seen this in one spaghetti western, you have seen it in all… But cacti and succulents are just not prickly pears, and Opuntias not to be touched by Mowgli, while he is singing along with Baloo unless he wants a Paw full of spines and thorns. All over the world, people have finally woken up to the potential of cactus and succulent plants as indoor as well as outdoor beautifiers of surroundings, especially when they are planning to plant ornamental plants, which have adapted themselves down the centuries to every sort of condition, and they can survive. This book is for those people, who have decided to know more about cactuses and succulents. Man is an instinctive collector of things, from orchids to butterflies. Once he found that all over the world, he could get more than 500,000 different varieties of succulents and cacti, he decided to add these plants to his collection repertoire. That is the reason why botanists are so fascinated with the lifestyle of these living objects, so that they can see the different natural development and changes which take place with the passing of time during the growth cycle of these particular plants.

On cactus collecting; Geography and climate of the cactus countries; Cultivation of cacti based on biological principles; Cultivation of epiphytic cacti; Seed-raising; Propagation by cuttings; Imported plants; Grafting; Pests and diseases; Calendar of work; Taxonomy and nomenclature; Descriptions genera.

An updated edition of the cult classic, featuring stunning archival photographs of hundreds of the rarest and most spectacular plants on Earth, taken by a motley crew of cactus obsessives “A catalogue of wonders that most of us will never get to see in person.”—The New Yorker From the people behind Cactus Store comes Xerophile, a photographic collection of these improbable desert wonders in the wild. Drawing on the archives of twenty-five cactus obsessives—from PhD botanist to banker, art teacher to cancer researcher—this revised edition spans eighty years and features new and expanded descriptive notes for all 350+ photos. Xerophile brings together eighty years’ worth of these explorers’ remarkable images from some of the world’s most remote habitats: a peculiar two-leaved plant that lives for millennia in the deserts of Namibia; succulents whose poisonous sap is used by hunters to fell large game in Angola; and cactus that live on snow-covered mountains in Bolivia, sink below ground level to survive droughts in Mexico, are pollinated by bats in Brazil, and grow in pure lava fields of the Galápagos Islands.

Third-grader Aven Green has been solving mysteries for a really long time—a whole month! She’s solved many important cases like The Mystery of the Cranky Mom, The Mystery of the Missing Ice Cream, and The Mystery of the Smelly Feet. Her record is nearly 100% (only The Mystery of the Cereal in My Underpants remains unsolved to this day). Aven asks all the right questions, wields her detective kit carefully, and follows up on every clue. Then her teacher’s lunch bag (with her lunch still in it) is taken and Aven’s great-grandma’s beloved dog goes missing! Can this perceptive detective crack two cases at the same time? Luckily, Aven has a super-powered brain full of lots of extra brain cells to take on both cases. See, she was born without arms, so all of the cells that were supposed to make her arms went into making her brain instead. At least that’s her working theory for The Mystery of Why I Have So Many Extra Brain Cells.