There don’t seem to be gloves thick enough for handling some of them. That’s why I frequently wear none to maximize my dexterity and instead use my BBQ tongs when I’m repotting them or moving them in the garden. They still nail me sometimes and I’m a little scared of my coastal cholla because we’ve had some disagreements. The funniest is certainly the time I flipped a fallen piece of it into my face with my hori-hori and it stuck to my chin. That’s probably the only selfie I should ever have bothered taking and yet I was too preoccupied with getting the cactus off of my face to think to.

San Diego barrel cactus is much tamer comparatively speaking and I adore this species. I’ve got buds on mine and many in the preserves are in flower. Toward sundown one can watch solitary cactus bees find blossoms to curl up in. This one may or may not have moved on after I saw it faceplant late in the day. Only one is visible in the shot below, but this flower had many Argentine ants swarming it and others nearby. Said invasive species makes life hard for the native pollinators and the cacti as well. These ants think nothing of attacking other small living things and I’ve wondered how often these bees get a restful night's sleep when the former are present (someone who studies them for a living surely knows).

My golden cereus began blooming for the first time and it’s a hit with the native bees in particular. A friend of mine who was in school at the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden (now the California Botanic Garden) brought it down the 15 from their nursery for me as a single stemmed plant. It’s grown its heart out since being planted and is now quite large with many branches.

Here’re a couple of other recent beauties for the fun of it. The crimson one was purchased as Trichocereus ‘Fuente de Sangre’. Taxonomists have since said, “Um, actually, Trichocereus is really Echinopsis.” It’s chilling near some eastern Mojave buckwheat (Eriogonum fasciculatum var. foliolosum) and Aloe aculeata. Aloe peglerae and Aloe dorotheae are nearby with the latter being almost as bright as this flower. Wildflowers bloom around their skirts in season.

And here’s one from the garden for those who can’t be brought over to the spiny side unless roses are involved. As part of our ongoing hillside project, I added a San Diego mountain lilac (Ceanothus cyaneus) in a one gallon pot last fall. If it survives its first hot summer (and the Argentine ants don’t farm mealybugs and scale around its roots) it should do well from there desiring no supplemental water. That’s a big “if,” but I planted it with a black sage (Salvia mellifera) and placed some large rocks around it in an attempt to keep its roots cool.