Opuntia basilaris var. treleasei

The Bakersfield C

actus & Succulent Society

% Stephen C

ooley, editorthecactuspatch@

bak.rr.com

Volume 3 August 2000 Number 8

THE NEWSLETTER OF THE BAKERSFIELD CACTUS & SUCCULENT SOCIETY

Monthly Meeting

Tuesday, August 8First Baptist ChurchChristian Life Center

5500 Olive drive at 7 PM

(West of 99 freeway on corner of Olive drive & Victor street)

This Month's Program

Cactus Potterypresented by Erika Van Auker

Get ReadyGet Ready for the Fair for the Fair

and theand theShow & Sale!Show & Sale!

Ed Colley's

Cham

aecereus (Echinopsis) sylvestris

Photo by S

tephen Cooley

Volume 3 Number 8

August 2000

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BCSS general meeting: July 11, 2000We had another good turnout of over 20 people at the July meeting! Vice

president Lynn McDonald started the meeting by announcing that the club's first Show & Sale would be held at the East Hills Mall on October 7 & 8. She stressed the need for everyone to start getting actively involved as October is not that far away. There is also the very large Inter-city Cactus and Succulent Show coming up in August at the L.A. arboretum. The fair is coming up as well so there is plenty to keep us busy in the coming months.

Librarian Bobby Williams said that Gordon Rowley's Adenium and Pachypodium Handbook is missing. Please let us know if you have it (don't forget to check out the books so we know where they are).

Refreshment Czar Bill McDonald mentioned that he had no trouble getting people to bring refreshments for the first six months, but now the list is nearly empty. Don't forget to sign up at the meeting or call Bill to volunteer. [The club will provide the drinks and there is a Von's just across the street from the meeting place. It really isn't all that hard to stop by and pick up some snacks]

Lynn also mentioned that the August show will be on Pottery. Erika Van Auker, well known for her beautiful pots for cactus and succulents will be our presenter. Also, there very well could be some pots for sale, so bring your wallets.

The presentation was an excellent slide show on Baja Cactus given by Russ & Cheri Lewis. The slides came from the many trips that they have made to Baja. The pictures were all beautiful, quality photographs and gave us a good feel for not just the succulents, but the entire experience of the Baja peninsula. Among the sights we saw were: chollas, mammillarias, boojums, ferocacti, dolphins, a sea snake, cardons, island scenery, inland scenery, the Pacific ocean, the Sea of Cortez, Bergerocactus, organpipe cactus, sea lions, seagulls, wine and banana-eating moths, brown and blue-footed boobies, and an occasional lizard. Thank you Russ and Cheri for the great show!

Bruce Hargreaves also made a short presentation of some slides from the clubs' Baja field trip in April. Among the highlights were: changing a flat tire (one of many), fossil ammonites, petroglyphs, and a Euphorbia ingens which was masquerading under the name "Organ Pipe Cactus." These presentations showed us once again just how lucky we are to have such a great place so close to home.

Also on hand to look at was an album of Baja pictures brought in by Russ and Cheri. Bruce brought in some yard sale pictures and some more Baja photos as well as some fossils and a Euphorbia misera. He also had a spiny fruit of the root succulent Marah which grows in Baja as well as our own foothills.

The plant of the month table had a good assortment of mostly unstaged plants -- I hope everyone got some feedback on how to stage them for the show. The plant raffle was especially appreciated by Mylon, Dan, and Bobby who all won more than once. Leslie Moe won the name tag raffle, taking home a beautiful Pachypodium geayi.

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The Cactus Patch is the official publication of the Bakersfield Cactus & Succulent Society (BCSS) of Bakersfield, California. Meetings are held on the second Tuesday of each month at the times and places noted within. GUEST ARE ALWAYS WELCOME

2000 Officers

President - Rob SkillinVice-President - Lynn McDonald

Treasurer - Maynard MoeSecretary - Bonnie EastEditor - Stephen Cooley

2000 Directors

CSSA Representative - Bobby WilliamsPast President - Bruce Hargreaves

2000 Chairpersons

Refreshments - Bill McDonaldHistorian - Bobby WilliamsLibrarian - Bobby Williams

Field Trips - Dan French

Material in The Cactus Patch may be reprinted by non-profit organizations (unless such permission is expressly denied in a note accompanying the material) provided that the proper credit is given to the BCSS & the author and that one copy of the publication containing the reprinted material is sent to the editor. Reproduction in whole or part by any other organization without the permission of the BCSS editor is prohibited. Contact thecactuspatch@bak.rr.com

BCSS Executive Board Meeting: July 25, 2000Members present: Rob, Bonnie, Maynard, Bruce, and Linda

The Board Meeting was short and sweet! We discussed the upcoming trip to Lotusland, which five members of our club attended, thanks to the Fresno club. The topic for the August meeting was reviewed, and it was mentioned that members might be interested in bringing plants that need pots to the August meeting and buy a pot to fit the plant! The Plant of the Month was decided for August. Displays for the Show and Sale were discussed and Rob and Maynard will have a display ready for viewing at the August meeting. The Fair is coming up (September 20-October 1) and we briefly discussed the theme for our display (Life is Fair); we will ask for a committee to form to work on the display. The treasurer reported that we still have about the same amount of money. Bruce mentioned that the Huntington Gardens will be having a symposium called "Splendid Floras and Great Succulents" on the weekend of September 2nd. The Intercity show is August 19-20. We were reminded that members may meet prior to the August meeting at Cactus Valley for dinner. Bruce mentioned that the journal "Plant Talk" is now defunct. Last but not least, the next Board meeting will be August 29 at the Skillin's house.

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The BCSS Show and Sale Committee ReportThe co-chairs met on July 28 to recoup after the summer vacations. We

tried to organize the many tasks that are ahead of us to get our show and sale up and running! We decided that the entire Show and Sale committee (that's all of you folks who signed up last spring) will need to meet to assign tasks, so bring your calendars to the August meeting! The members who signed up are: Lynn, Maynard, Bonnie, Ed, Bruce, the Cowies, Gordon, Rob, Terry, Linda and Anne.

I Dreamed of AfricaKuki Gallmann, 1991, Penguin Books, N.Y.

This is not a book about plants, but it does have some occasional relevant comments. One of these is, "We have planted today an avenue of euphorbia along the main drive; one day they should be imposing, but all the staff warn me that elephant love them." I have never heard of such a problem, although in Malawi rhinos have been a problem and both there and in Uganda baboons have been known to get high on the latex of candelabra euphorbias. The avenue was not eaten as shown by the pictures later in the book and I am told is well shown in the film based on the book (Incidentally, there is a "film" edition of the book, but I think the original pictures are of greater interest).

The next page reports that, among other things, the elephants ate "all the succulents" and the sanseveria [sic]. I don't know what succulents (other than sanseveria) there were, but a picture later in the book shows prickly pears and a columnar cactus. At one point Ms. Gallmann does mention a small portulaca planted on her husband's grave.

This brings up a very grave problem with this book. It concentrates too much on death. Perhaps in this sense the allegation is true that it does not represent Africa (whatever that is). As anywhere, the African continent has a mix of despair and hope. The book did make me homesick, even though I have never lived in Kenya. It reminded me of my work with the Mokolodi Reserve much further south in Botswana. There, too, we had plantings destroyed by the wild animals, making our job of creating an integrated environmental education center more difficult.

Changing subjects, diehards who endured the four hour A&E film "Longitude" were treated to a brief look at succulents on Barbados. These included turk's cap cacti, columnar cacti and agaves (one in full bloom). This was a high point in a presentation that I felt could easily have been presented in an hour.

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Activity at the Raffle Table Photo by Stephen Cooley

LOTUSLANDOn July 29th, Bruce, Polly, Anne, Lynn, and Linda joined the Fresno

Cactus and Succulent Society on their trip to Lotusland. We departed from Bakersfield at 7 am, on our way to a rendezvous at the James Dean Memorial in Cholame. The Fresno folks showed up around 8:30 and off we went to Lotusland! We were given a very nice box breakfast (included in our trip cost) and the trip seemed to move quickly: we were in Santa Barbara before lunch! We had lunch at the Santa Barbara Mission and had time to look around before boarding the bus again to go to Montecito, home of Lotusland. When we disembarked at Lotusland, we were put into groups of 10 and led by knowledgeable docents on our tour around the gardens. Madame Ganna Walska (the latest owner of the garden) developed the 37 acre estate into at least seven distinct gardens. We moseyed and meandered our way through the Australian, Cycad, Epiphyllum, Succulent, Blue, Bromeliad, Cacti, Euphorbia, Aloe, Japanese, and Fern Gardens. Of course, Bruce wanted to take home all the euphorbs, and Linda wanted all of the aloes. In addition, there was a "theater" created with terraces and hedges, several water gardens, a topiary garden in progress, a fruit orchard, and the visitor center, where several of us acquired some new plants! By a strange twist of fate, Bruce bought an aloe and Linda bought a euphorb! After the tour, we got back on the bus and traveled to Arroyo Grande for dinner. After dinner, we were treated to a video (on the bus!) about the Intercity show and sale which was very interesting and helped the time fly by. We all got off at the James Dean Memorial and returned to Bakersfield by around 10 p.m. I think everyone who

participated will agree that it was a grand tour!6

PROGRAM NOTESErika Van Auker will present our program this month. She came to the US

in 1958. She attended PierceCollege, taking classes in design, painting, sculpture, jewelry, and ceramics. She has also taken many classes at Glendale College to learn different techniques in ceramics. She has worked extensively in clay for the past 17 years and is well known for her unique and beautiful pots for cacti and succulents. Erika's pots always elicit signs of admiration. When the Fresno Cactus and Succulent Society members heard that she would be speaking to us, they were exceedingly jealous! She will be bringing pots to sell at the program, so bring in that plant that needs the "perfect" pot!

PLANT OF THE MONTHI'll bet all of us have a couple of plants (just 1 or 2) that we don't know the names of! So grab a couple of them, put them in a box and bring them to the August meeting because these poor anonymous plants are the Plants of the Month! We hope someone will recognize them and give them a name!

The Most Widespread Succulent

The answer to last month's question as to the succulent mentioned in Thoreau's Walden is purslane (Portulaca oleracea). This is probably the most widespread of all succulents. Although most people consider it a weed, it is edible both raw and cooked and is sometimes deliberately cultivated. My brother Robert recently purchased a bunch at the local Marcado Latino and Dr. Peter Kortmann, a Dutch physician, proudly served us some from his garden in Malawi. I use it as food for our desert tortoise.

Although some claim has been made for its pre-Columbian presence in the New World, most botanists accept an Old World origin. W.J. Burchell, in his Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa (facsimile reprint 1967, C. Struik, Cape Town), describes feasting on purslane which covered Asbestos Hill in South Africa. Allen Moorehead, in his historical fiction Cooper's Creek, describes how early British explorers in Australia fed on purslane. Unfortunately, they didn't eat enough as they all eventually died of scurvy.

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Photo by Stephen Cooley

Jennifer Cooley with a flower of Trichocereus candicans

Photo by Stephen Cooley

Photo by Maynard Moe

Aloe jucunda

AT OUR WEB SITEA visitor to our web site recently asked a question about a Lithops. Here is a

copy of that question and Rob's reply:

Hello. I came across your group's page on the internet and need some help with my lithop cactus, so i thought you could possibly help me.

Anyhow, here's the problem. I've had this guy for about half a year now, and he's in the process of splitting and growing another part. However, on one side of him, there's this really freaky-looking decay. It's sort of grayish and rough-looking, and about halfway down, he turns kind of green and a bit bumpy. It hasn't hit the roots yet, but i don't know what's happening.

I've got him in a small clay pot, and put a small amount of water in the bottom about every two-to-three days, most of which gets absorbed by the pot. Am i drowning him, or possibly not watering him enough? What do you think is happening, and is there anything i can do to change it? He definitely gets enough light -- he's next to a window inside all day, every day, and i live in massachusetts, so the sun's out a bunch.

Is there any advice you can give me?

thank you. take care..

-jason.

Is the decay on the side to the sun? Lithops can burn easily if the light is too strong and they do not have enough water. Or if they are moved to a location with brighter light than they are used to, or even turned so a new side faces the sun. If it is decay, it would be soft and spreading. I'm not sure you can do anything about it.

The way to tell if they need more water is to check for wrinkles. Once you see that, give it a moderate amount of water, and it should be OK for some time. After it flowers in the late summer or fall, withhold water until the old leaves are consumed by the new, and then resume water again, sometime in the spring.

Rob

Be sure to visit us atwww.BakersfieldCactus.org

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Periodical ReviewThe June 2000 issue of Natural History (published by the American

Museum of Natural History in New York) has an interesting article called "A Worm That Turned" by Peter Stiling. He describes how the caterpillar of the moth Cactoblastus cactorum was used to clear vast areas of Australia of unwanted prickly pears. This worked well in an area which is geographically isolated. Elsewhere it may create problems as well as solutions. I wondered about this in Lesotho where my cactus garden became infested with these black and orange goblins which ate my plants from the inside out. Fortunately Lesotho has no natural cactus populations to worry about and cultivation of prickly pears is not a practical consideration. I presume the moths in Lesotho came from South Africa where they were introduced for the same reasons as in Australia. I hope they don't spread into neighboring Botswana which has been experimenting with prickly pear cultures both as a food and as a host for the cochineal bug (a mealy bug which produces a red dye).

More serious is the report in the June article that cactoblastus has spread from Nevis Island in the lesser Antilles, where it was used as an Opuntia control, to Cuba and Florida. It is now endangering species of cactus such as the semaphore opuntia, Opuntia spinosissima. In addition to propagating this rare plant by cuttings, attempts are now being considered to control the caterpillars with a parasitic wasp. It seems that the much vaunted biological control has some problems.

The June National Geographic has a brief mention, to wit: "Dholavirawas a walled city occupying about 120 acres on an island stippled withthornbush and cactus in the Rann of Kutch..." Considering that this was in the ancient India of 2500 B.C., it would be a very strange distribution for ancient cacti! I suspect is arises from the presence of American cacti in modern India. Perhaps they could use some Cactoblastus!

The July/August issue of National Parks reports that Cadiz, Inc. and the Metropolitan water district of Southern California are purposing to pump water from an aquifer under Mojave National Preserve. The Park Service is concerned that the project may deplete natural springs and seeps. The draft environmental impact statement is said to be seriously flawed and a supplemental EIS is in progress.

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ThankYouLynn and Stephen

for bringing the July treats!

announcementsThe Show and Sale will be October 7 and 8 at the East Hills Mall.

Bruce has brought to my attention that anyone interested in obtaining Frankincense can do so by contacting: Frankincense Co., PO Box 1440, Maricopa, Arizona 85239 (520-568-2278, ext. 334). The email address is: frankincense@aol.com.

Any members interested in dinner at Cactus Valley before the August meeting are encouraged to meet at 5:30. The restaurant is located on Rosedale highway, west of Hwy 99 (also west of the skate park and John's Incredible Pizza). It is on the south side of the road. If you need more info, call Linda.

The Great Kern County Fair is coming! The theme this year is "Life is Fair". Bruce will be telling us about some of his ideas for turning this theme into an award-winning display! Plan on helping out!

Please start saving small boxes to use at the Show and Sale!

Bruce reports that the journal "Plant Talk" published by Kew Gardens is now defunct, due to lack of interest apparently. If you were planning to subscribe, you missed your chance!

The Huntington Gardens will be holding a Symposium titled "Splendid Floras and Great Succulents" on the weekend of September 2.

The Intercity Show and Sale--one of the best in the world-- will be held August 19-20 at the Los Angeles County Arboretum. This is just an hour and a half away! If you haven't ever gone, you should try to make it this year! It's pretty easy to find and you don't even have to drive in L.A.! (Pasadena isn't LA!). I'm sure several members already have plans to attend, so you should be able to find someone who can help you out with information!

If you haven't returned your list of the plants you will be able to display at the Show and Sale, please take a moment and jot down the names of some of the plants and bring it to the meeting! Thank you!

CORRECTION: Last month's roster had an incorrect email address for Bonnie East.

Answers to last month's anagrams:

I'm a nude = AdeniumHere it occurs = Trichocereus

Can ruin a = Uncarina

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CALENDARAugust 8 BCSS meeting; 7:00 p.m. at Bakersfield Christian Life Center

Program: Pottery for Cactus presented by Erika Van AukerPlant of the Month: Any plant you have without a name.

August 19-20 The 15th Annual Intercity Show & Sale. L.A. ArboretumAugust 29 BCSS Executive meeting, 7:00 p.m. at the Skillin's house.September 2 "Splendid Floras and Great Succulents" Symposium

Huntington Botanical GardensSeptember 12 BCSS meeting; 7:00 pm.Bakersfield Christian Life CenterSeptember 16-17 Monterey Bay Area C&SS Show.September 24 Long Beach Cactus Club annual succulent plant auction.September 26 BCSS Executive meeting, 7:00 p.m. at ???October 7-8 BCSS Show & Sale East Hills MallOctober 10 BCSS meeting; 7:00 pm.Bakersfield Christian Life CenterOctober 14-15 Orange County C&SS Show, Cal State Fullerton.October 21-22 San Gabriel C&SS 7th Annual Winter Show & Sale.October 21-22 C&SS of California Show (Oakland)October 24 BCSS Executive meeting, 7:00 p.m. at ???

Contact the editor for more information concerning calendar events

To have your article printed in get in touch with:

Stephen Cooley, editor Linda Cooley, editorthecactuspatch@bak.rr.com

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