No, not Arizona—this cactus blooms at 7,500′ elevation in the Rockies! See the tiny ant helping with pollination?
I had a hard time getting used to the idea that cactus thrives in a high mountain pine forest.
Prickly pear (Opuntia spp.) in the hot, dry grasslands lower down our canyon, their flat pads flopping over sandy ledges? Yes, that seemed natural.
But ball cactuses at the feet of pine trees?
That’s just plain odd.
Still, that’s where we found them my first year in the Rockies.
A big patch of softball-size cactuses nestled among the rocks, topped by hot-pink flowers with the gleam of silk.
Exotic-looking things, for sure. Something you’d expect to come across in southern Arizona, maybe, keeping company with other cactuses and scrawny desert bushes.
But I was climbing a rocky cliff, ducking under branches of pines, to get a better look at them.
And the cactuses were growing among penstemons and wild blue larkspur and lupine-like golden banner, wildflowers that look at home under the trees.
It was May 30 the first time we came across the blooming cactuses. Summer for most of the country, but early spring at our home place in the high mountains.
Which I still hadn’t realized is actually a desert.
Blame it on the flowers. The flush of bloom that covers the meadows and fills every crack in the rocks with subalpine wildflowers sure looks lush. So do the shady pine forests, where blue columbines and orchids grow like weeds and white violets fill big patches of ground.
“Dry year,” I’d comment, as I hauled water to my fledgling garden, where it seemed to evaporate as soon as I turned my back.
It wasn’t a dry year.
It was normal.
Ten to 16 inches of water a year, and most of that is in the form of snow. Summers are dry, dry, dry, except for brief afternoon thunderstorms—or hail storms—on occasion.
I’d already learned that transplanting native wildflowers to my garden wasn’t easy.
Even the littlest guys have long taproots that go way down deep. And I mean deep.
Oh. Water. Duh.
And those plants in the rocks? They’re counting on the boulders to block the drying wind and sun, maintaining some moisture in the soil below.
Cactuses? Well, sure—once I realized I was living in a desert.
It’d been an early spring last year, and I was thinking about the cactuses as we drove home from town one fine early April day.
“Wonder if the cactuses are blooming?” I almost said as we turned onto the dirt road that climbs the mountain. But thinking further, I kept my mouth shut, knowing I was just trying to hurry spring along.
Golden banner (Thermopsis montana) was just beginning to poke up. And the blue Nuttall’s larkspur I love (Delphinium nuttallianum) was nothing but the first leaves.
Mostly, everything looked tan and dry.
Way too early for the cactuses, I figured.
Then we rounded a curve. Dabs of bright pink along a ledge stood out like a sore thumb among the tawny dry grass.
Those bright pink flowers stand out to our eyes—and to those of native bees and other pollinators seeking early nectar when spring comes to the Rockies.
“Cactuses! Cactuses blooming!” I hollered. “Back up!”
Sure enough. A solid slab of rock had been soaking up the warm sun for weeks. And the row of ball cactuses that crowned the thermal mass of the rock were exploding with flowers.
This time, I didn’t have to scramble up a cliff to get a better look. They were right at eye level.
Happy bees, both European and native, had found them, too. So had itty-bitty ants, which were crawling over the silken blossoms. Dozens of other small native pollinators, too, mostly gnat-like guys, were foraging at the lustrous pink flowers.
I’d never met ball cactus (Escobaria vivipara; sometimes called Coryphantha vivipara), before I moved to the Front Range of the Rockies, but it has a huge native range—pretty much the entire western half of North America, way up to Hudson Bay in Canada, and as far east as Minnesota.
You can buy seeds for ball cactus from Plants of the Southwest, if you’re not lucky enough to have a patch on your own place. Give it good drainage in a raised bed with added sand or fine gravel, and it’ll happily grow in your garden, just in case you want to add an unexpected touch of the desert to your yard.
Just one word of caution: Handle with care, with good stout leather gloves.
These tidy globes with the lovely silken flowers are also called spiny star, and, boy, do they live up to the “spiny” part of their name. They’re armed with an abundance of wicked spines to keep critters from eating them. I learned that one the hard way, too.
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