The poor thing looked pretty emaciated, so I tried to help by giving him water which he responded well too. Hope he made it.
Pusch Ridge Wilderness, AZ.
sorry for the bad camera work, I was trying to film with one hand and slowly poor water out of the water bottle at the same time.
I couldn't believe that thing disappeared down that hole. Let's just say the rest of the hike I was extra cautious of the holes all around me. Catalina State Park AZ.
I have been doing Trichocereus horticulture professionally for 7 years and here's what I learned.
MAYBE one of the plants in the photo will make it on to become a named cultivar, the rest will be disposed of. When producing a new cultivar it is important to evaluate and cull plants under many different criteria not just if it has a nice flower.
First is vigour, sew 500 seeds of a particular cross and after the first or second year you cull all but the 100 largest of plants, before you even seeing a flower, insuring your cultivar has vigours growth and can be readily propagated. Get rid of the runts.
Second you let them flower for the first time and go through and evaluate for color saturation, petal size, petal count, petal shape, and flower size, leaving you with maybe 10 clones.
Then you wait another year or two to get an idea of how floriforus a particular clone is. (Flower count is highly genetic, if given the same sun, water and nutrients certain cultivars will have more flowers than others) We want big flushes of many flowers not just one or two here or there. We also want multiple blooms a year, again some cultivars will bloom once a year some will bloom all through the warm season. If you have a cultivar that blooms once a year, if you miss it you have to wait a whole other year.
So that will leave you with maybe 1 good cultivar out of 500 seedling, if you get 1. If none of them meet ALL of the criteria than you start over.
Also, make sure you know both the mother and father in case someone wants to breed with your cultivar, then you can trace the lineage back to what species the original parents were. Also if there is already a similar cultivar and yours isn't better in some way, try again. A cultivar should only receive a name once it is proven horticulturally significant. Not every pretty flower gets a name. If you are wondering why Tricho cultivars can seem so confusing, ambiguous or arbitrary, it's because non-horticulturally significant clones are being named and sold as different things.
Named cultivars should be the best of the best of the best!
Not sure if it's a caterpillar, sawfly, or what as it never unfurled. But it was super cool looking. Found in the pine forest zone of the Santa Catalina Mts. SE. AZ.
Crotalus atrox just moving along in Tucson, Arizona. 😁 Love seeing these guys it gives me hope there is a healthy eco system around. Or just a lot of mice. 🤷
Two C. atrox well "Doing the Dance" 😆 sorry I was excited.
Situated at over 9,000 ft in the Pinaleño Mountains, these caves are more of a fissure in the granite of the mountain. The second photo shows a cool breccia I found in there. I'm not entirely sure on the formation of the fissures but it has some really cool ice formations and I was told some of the ice has been in there since the last ice age. Kind of like the last little remnants of the montane glaciers that once descended from the ancient Sky Island Ranges.
Edit:
I was wrong, cave with snowmelt.
A beautiful A. obesum x crispum hybrid by Dr. Mark Dimmitt
Look at the color variation of the flowers on this 'Apricot Glow' by Mark Dimmitt.
Adenium arabicum
$300 + shipping.
USA only,
Seed grown, seed collected from the area of Jabal Shada, Saudi Arabia. Brand new arabicum genetics in cultivation. Plant is ~10 years old.
USA only, Ship via USPS, Zelle PayPal accepted.
Doing some pollentation at work so I decided to take some photos and explain the anatomy. This is the flower of a tetraploid obesum so all the parts are probably about double the size of a regular flower. The second photo is with the fused anthers intact and the First photo is after removing one of the anther to get access to the stigma. This particular plant is pollen sterile so the pollen cluster is missing in the photo. In the first photo you can see what looks like a little round button. That is the inert cap that sits about the receptive stigma and prevents self-fertilization. Third and Forth photo you can see an insitu pollen cluster and then it is removed.