Echinocereus triglochidiatus MG260.9 "White Sands"     5/8/15
This is the famous “claret-cup hedgehog cactus” that gets to be more than 3 feet (1 m) tall (or long!). The cactus expert Del Weniger in his book “Cacti of the Southwest” claims that he only saw specimens of no more than 18” (45 cm) tall when he visited White Sands. He also claims that some friends in Albuquerque collected some of these and when they were planted in Albuquerque, the plants proceeded to shrink to less than half that size, and stayed there, proceeding to slowly grow taller over the next years. This is just crazy. E. trig. plants do shrink down as winter approaches, but come right back to full size when growth resumes in the spring, and proceed to get taller. If you take what Weniger said seriously, it means that the plant is under a magic spell making it tall in White Sands. The spell is broken when the plant lives anywhere not in White Sands. Del Weniger was an idiot, for this and many other reasons. He’s dead, so I can libel him. Another cactus expert, Lyman Benson, in his “The Cacti of the United States and Canada” does not mention this amazingly large E. trig. Neither does Anderson or Hunt in their more recent encyclopedic books. The plant in nature is easy to find. Drive to White Sands National Monument south of Alamogordo NM and get out of the car after the entrance station. The E. trig. are everywhere in the tall grass that you will see in front of you. Besides many large ones at White Sands, I have seen two plants over 3 feet tall (about 1 m) growing outside at a now closed commercial greenhouse in Santa Fe, which is about 300 miles from White Sands. Our club in Albuquerque has a more than 3’ specimen lying down in our demonstration garden at the Albuquerque Garden Center. It pushes out dozens of flowers every spring.   (05/40)   

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