Cactus Explorers Journal - The Cactus Explorers Club

The Cactus Explorer ISSN 2048-0482 Number 4 May 2012
Fig.8 A wonderful Echinocereus plant in bloom.
mentioned, Weniger recognized var. gonacathus
treating it as a valid taxon of plants with
relatively small stature. He concludes after
making observations of both White Sands
plants and var. gonacanthus elsewhere that the
the two are identical in every way except for
size. To his credit, Weniger sought an
explanation for this. He found his satisfaction
in two examples of transplanted plants.
Apparently he had friends in Albuquerque
and Colorado who took 12 inch or taller plants
from White Sands and planted them in their
gardens. He claims that in both cases the stems
shrunk to half their size within one year.
Finally concluding that the population at
White Sands is the most amazing example of
the variation due to environment on any cactus
species. In Flora of North America vol 4, page
168, the idea in Weniger's five paragraphs are
paraphrased (repeated) in a half paragraph.
Namely that the size is strictly due to
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environment.
There are a number of problems with
Weniger's observations, however. First is his
claim that the maximum size of these plants is
a mere 18 inches. In my short visit to habitat, I
easily found many plants over this and
reaching up to 28 inches. However, Dave
Ferguson reported to me that the largest
example he found was a stem 6 inches in
diameter and 6 feet in length. To imagine that a
3 feet long stem is going to shrink and become
a 6 or 8 inch specimen as var. gonacanthus has
been defined, is quite a silly thought.
Furthermore, a vigorously-growing large wild
plant that is dug and moved to somebody's
garden 100s of miles away is certainly going to
suffer greatly from transplant shock. This is
especially true within the the first year after
transplant as Weniger cited. Last, but not least,
the characteristics of seed-grown plants would
be a far more proper test to determine the