Cactus Blog

It’s 5pm and this Fockia crispa is ready to get out of here

Testing out my new iPhone app on this Cleistocactus strausii!

It’s a Good Luck Beaver, by local artist Jeff Pidgeon, visiting our Happy Succulents.

Pseudobombax ellipticum, or as we prefer to call it, Bombax ellipticum. I’ve never seen one this size bloom, and just the one flower.

Nice!

Rikki working on one of her signature terrariums.

Beautiful!

This is apparently from an episode of the Power Rangers called Ep. 20: The Toxic Flower Cactus of Death.

Nice!

A cactus that attacks it’s owner?!?

Oh the Horror!

You can read the whole 5 page horror story about the attacking cactus. I especially like the part about it being a misunderstood cactus – a loving cactus that just loves too much.

Sent in by Trey at The Golden Gecko. Thanks Trey!

I see that the Garden Rant’ers have finally discovered the made-in-america hoses we carry – by Water Right. Good stuff.

Euphorbia royleana

Apparently this plant has the common name of Churee. I don’t know anything about how it got that name.

The plant itself is from the Himalayan regions of India. It has stunning leaves which we find always drop off on us.

Here’s a closeup of the blooms with a new leaf started right behind.

Euphorbia royleana will grow tree like to maybe 8ft. tall, slowly. The branches all tend to grow fairly vertically, around 3″ diameter.

Moderately poisonous like most Euphorbias, mostly its milky white sap is a bad irritant. But don’t ingest, please.

These are hardy to about 28F, however we find they cannot handle our normal winter rains so we keep them under cover in Berkeley. They make a great potted houseplant since they can handle fairly low light levels and very low water levels, without eventually growing as tall as some of the other columnar euphorbias around that will hit the ceiling of your home.

Pretty flowers are on the way, soon enough with this lovely tree Aloe.

Aloe speciosa is also known as the Tilt-head Aloe. It’s from the southern parts of South Africa. It’s generally found in groups, ie Aloe forests. The Red buds will turn pure white when they open. And of course like all aloes the hummingbirds go crazy girl them, checking back every day for more open blooms.

They are a tree Aloe, getting as tall as 20ft. and pretty quick too for a thick trunked succulent.

Thanks Cheri for the heads-up to this craigslist listing in Berkeley. They’re local! And awesome!

Carole made us this amazing needlepoint cactus.

It’s a very fruitful prickly pear. Thanks Carole!

Yesterday’s stormy rain left us with moist succulents.

Kalanchoe

Crassula

Senecio

Yesterdays stormy rain is over and today it is gorgeous and sunny.

We were very busy yesterday, and now what can we expect for today? -  the last day we are open for the year.

In case you were wondering, we do have a few more wooden succulent wall panels available for sale on this last day to buy your loved ones a beautiful and delicious Christmas present. (Open ’til 5:oo).

It’s only a few hours (or less if you live on the east coast) til 12 12 12 12 12, or 12/12/12 12:12 as some would have it.

Here, have a picture to tide you over:

Cryptanthus “Pink Starlight”

Cryptanthus “Ruby”

If the Ellen Show can stoop to showing the public this stupid photo, so can we.

We don’t sell that type of succulent at the Cactus Jungle.

“As seen on TV.”

Stewart who lives in Alamo.

You didn’t think I forgot my yearly post on the latest and the greatest in high tech cactus costumes, did you?

I would never forget!

We feature only the tastiest cactus costumes. The razzliest and dazzliest cactus costumes. The pastiest and brassiest. On to the costumes!

Up first:

Student in recycled materials cactus costume. Horizon School, Marin (CA).

And this one is an adult dressed as a cactus with a tail, as brough to to you by Coca Cola.

Finally this is a homemade Saguaro costume that is more cute than you all deserve. MORE CUTE!

A new cactus lamp has finally made it onto the market, if you live in Europe. I don’t know of any US distributors but that’s probably only because I haven’t checked for any.

Cactus Table lamp
Brand: LZF

Designer Miguel Herranz
Cactus is a likeable and elegant table lamp made of wood veneer strips. Switched off it creates an interesting volume, and switched on it increases its beauty defining interesting volume, and switchd on it increases its beauty defining interesting patterns by the superposition of the different wood strips.

And it costs 271.83 € so you know it must be most excellent, and not just “likeable and elegant” which it certainly is also of course. I would totally agree with that marketing assessment. However the rest of the description looks like it went through a bad translator. “Increases its beauty defining interesting volume” is not a meaningful phrase in the English language. Maybe it was translated from an original Swedish, but through a midpoint of Italian and then to the French before finally landing on English.

Here let me show you how that works, but starting with English and then through Swedish etc and back to English: “The fox and the dog came to London to learn a new language” through the multi-language translator stuff comes back out into English as, “Fox and the dog came to London to learn a new language”. Huh! They’ve improved the translator programming. How about that.

Last week I posted a picture of a cactus skirt by a company called Nasty Girl, although they were out of the skirt. Now this week we see that a company called koshka has a cactus dress for sale and its in stock! and it turns out that it is the exact same fabric!

Nice use of fabric. I wonder who the fabric designer is, and where we can buy the fabric, and if we bought the fabric what we could do with it – would you buy a cactus print muffler from us? a cactus print finger warmer? a cactus print fabric square? a cactus print laptop bag?

(Thanks to Angie for the link)