VOLUME 14 :: January—October, 1952 Illustrations shown in ...

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16 THE CACTUS AND SUCCULENT January, 1952 THE CRAZIEST THING THAT GROWS By NEIL M. CLARK (Reprinted from the " Saturday Evening Post " of April 7th, 1951, by special permission of The Curtis Publishing Co., of Philadelphia, U.S.A.) The two deck hands stowed the last of the six cases in their assigned places. " Special handling," the labels said. One-by-twos nailed along the sides of the cases, jutted out at the ends for handles. Each case had small screened windows and was about the size and shape of a small doghouse with a gable roof. "Wonder what's in them ? " said the first hand. " Don't you know ? " said his mate scornfully. " This here's that new kind of cactus. Grows on deserts an' don't hardly need no rain. You feed cows on it, they get fat in no time. What you want to do, my lad, if you got a rich uncle that'll lend you a pile, is buy up a lot of this rotten-cheap land in Australia. Plant this cactus, buy cows an' lay back in yer hammock. In no time or less, yoj'H be richer'n Rockyfeller." Naturally, he didn't know a darn thing about it. But he was repeating a dream that many a "smart " man has believed in, and that nobody except sharpsters has cashed in on yet. And in fact, as his quick eyes had discovered through the windows of fine-meshed screen, the cases did contain great fat stems of prickly-pear cactus. This strange cargo went aboard a steamer in the harbor of Buenos Aires in March, 1925. It sailed the high seas for ten weeks and 14,000 miles, finally arriving at Sherwood, a suburb of Brisbane, in Australia. Actually, those six cases contained a small company of remarkable " soldiers " destined to win one of the toughest wars ever waged against one of man's life-and-death enemies—weeds—and they contributed as brilliant a chapter to the history of entomology as has been written since bug study became a science. Years before, somebody carried a prickly-pear cactus of the species Opuntia inermis to Australia ; nobody knows who, when or why. It was an odd plant, unknown in that part of the world, and seemed only a harmless curiosity. It is known that a pot of it was taken from Sydney to Scone, New South Wales, in 1839. Neighbors begged cuttings and planted them. They grew prolifically. Forty years later the cactus from that one pot had become tens of thousands of cactus plants, and they were beginning to be considered an agricultural threat. In 1893, Queensland declared cactus a noxious weed. By 1925 it had become one of the worst plagues ever to hit the island continent, and it was estimated that it had occupied more than 60,000,000 acres, half of them so completely that other plants, or man, couldn't compete with it. Cactus, in short, was threatening to drive man right out. People desperately dug it up, burned it and dragged it out by the roots. It was so stubborn that an Australian soldier in California, inspecting the so-called Burbank spineless cactus, warned wryly that in his homeland if you dug up a prickly-pear cactus and hung it high on a fence, it would grunt and stretch till its roots reached the ground, and the plant would go on growing. Many a settler had to give up his homestead, licked by cactus. Big holdings became memories on maps. All sorts of expedients were tried. Would cattle eat cactus ? They would if they had to. But it was found that all the cattle in Australia, eating only cactus, couldn't keep up with the annual increase, let alone the old growth. Would chemicals kill it ? Yes, arsenic pentoxide could lick it, but the cost of killing cactus that way was around fifty dollars an acre, and most of the land wasn't worth a tenth of that. So they got around to the idea that maybe cactus-eating insects would do the job without pay. World-wide studies were undertaken. Cactus is almost exclusively a native of the Americas ; it was almost unknown elsewhere before Columbus. But it has never been such a pest here as it became in Australia. Apparently it had American enemies, whether diseases or insects, that kept it in check. What were they ? Could they be introduced into Australia ? During this period, some 350 insects that throve on cactus were closely studied. The object was to find an insect that was deadly to prickly-pear cactus, but harmed nothing else, for any bug that could also live on wheat, grass, fruit or other economic plants could be an even worse pest than cactus. Detailed histories of literally hundreds of thousands of individual cactus-eating insects were studied, and twelve kinds were eventually established in Australia. The miracle bug, however, when he turned up, was more or less an accident. One member of the Australian commission happened to be travelling briefly in the Argentine, and located a few cocoons of an insect said to be bad news for cactus, which went by the terrible name, Cactoblastis cactorum. Thinking anything was worth trying, he saved the cocoons, and in a few days butterfles emerged and laid eggs. It was those eggs that were shipped in the mysterious cases from Buenos Aires in March, 1925. They hatched as caterpillars during the voyage. The cactus in the cases was there for the caterpillars to eat,
January, 1952 JOURNAL OF GREAT BRITAIN 17 From here on, the story moves rapidly. Approximately 2,750 eggs of this insect reached Australia in that lot. There was no second shipment. Within a year—after two generations—the number of the insects had increased to 2,540,000. The first ones to be released from close confinement were put out as eggs on some of the cactus plague spots in February and March, 1926. The caterpillars hatched and immediately went to work eating cactus. They ate it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The cactus couldn't take it. Whole plants rotted and died under this attack. A sober scientific paper, reporting results fourteen years later, said of these insects : " The conquest of prickly-pear has been due almost entirely to this remarkable insect. Its introduction brought a complete change in the outlook within a few years. Its progress has been spectacular, its achievements border on the miraculous. Great tracts of country, utterly useless on account of the dense growth of the weed, have been brought into production. The prickly-pear territory has been transformed as though by magic. ... In Queensland 22,000,000 acres of former dense pear country have been selected for settlement." Of all plants, cactus is probably the craziest, meanest, stubbornest, the hardest to kill, the ugliest, the one that takes the most different shapes and sizes and also the one that produces perhaps the loveliest flowers. For these and other reasons, cactus has become an object of affection and near worship for thousands of cactus nuts, or cactomaniacs. Cactus collecting is an absorbing hobby if you like it. The hobby is not new. A century ago the British novelist, Charles Dickens, was berating one of his characters for liking her cactus plants too well ; and at about the same time, the Duke of Bedford and others were bidding as much as thirty guineas for rare orchid cacti. It's not much different now, with the high-up financiers, Madame Ganna Walska, the former opera singer, who is apparently intent on building the world's finest private cactus collection on her thirty-five acre estate near Santa Barbara, California, recently paid a grower 585 dollars for a few cactus plants he didn't want to sell. When it's played that way, the hobby takes cash. However, for five dollars, an amateur can get quite a nice collection. Cactomania catches up with people in different ways. Dr. Arthur D. Houghton, well-known botanist and horticulturist and an old-time cactus hound, concentrated on cactus only after a neighbor asked him to identify a plant she had. He started to satisfy her curiosity and ended by stimulating his own to such an extent that he never got over it. Charles M. Fitzpatrick was running a gas station in Edinburg, Texas. An old Mexican slipped in furtively with a package under his arm. " You want to see ? " he whispered mysteriously. " What you got, Jose ? " The old man took the newspaper off a tomato box which was moderately full of what he declared were the rarest specimens in the cactus kingdom. Fitzpatrick, who was fresh from Georgia and ignorant about such things, parted with five bucks to own the prize. He learned almost at once that they were just common old cactus plants, found almost everywhere. But his interest was stirred. He went on to become a collector and grower, and today he has twenty acres in commercial gardens and sells millions of cactus plants all over the country. The classic king of cactomaniac, who does it all for love, is G. L. Berry, M.D., of Lawton, Oklahoma. Twenty years ago a friend who was moving gave Berry five plants. One was a night-blooming Epiphyllum, the large-flowered orchid cactus. Soon afterwards he visited the Garfield Park Conservatory in Chicago and saw a remarkable collection. He was off. His present collection is his third. The first was frozen out. The second was given away when he left home for graduate study. The third has grown steadily for eight years. Cactomaniacs love to get together and throw around the big Latin names of their plants. In his own eagerness to become acquainted with other collectors, Berry began listing the names of all he could find. When he travelled, he called on them. He thought others might like to have the list. Last year he printed it, and it contained 2,000 names. Next year he will reprint it with, he expects, 5,000 names. He believes there are more than 10,000 serious cactus collectors in the United States. Many collectors get a kick out of digging their own specimens in the wild. Some States frown on this. Others are glad to have the stupid stuff carted off. Berry's favorite hunting ground is the Guadalupe Mountains in New Mexico, where roads are few and competition is scarce. A gleam is in his eye when he tells of seeing mounds of Echinocereus stramineus with hundreds of heads literally covered with bloom ; " Claret-red blossoms beautiful beyond description ! " In tiny pockets of earth in lava beds, where rocks were so hot from the sun that they almost burned holes in his shoes, he has come across Echinocereus coccineus in equally gorgeous bloom. Those are moments collectors live for ! (to be concluded)
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VOLUME 14 :: January—October, 1952 Illustrations shown in ...

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