Thursday, July 12, 2012

Parodia fusca?

I picked up this cactus at a Lowe's. Here, they are supplied by Altman Plants, (you may know them as the company who glues the dyed strawflowers onto their cacti to catch peoples eye and help cacti sell better.) This was one of those cacti. One nice thing about Altman is they label their cacti. Unfortunately, they aren't always correctly labeled. This one is sold under the name Rebutia krainziana. It's not even a Rebutia. After polling multiple sources and my own research, the conclusion is this is most likely Parodia fusca.

Bald spots and the beginning of more flower buds

I tried to remove the fake flower carefully, but ended up pulling out a few spines in the process. The flower was hot glued to the top of the plant, you can see everything above the ring of missing spines is new growth since I've had it.Eventually the injury will grow out and the cactus will look fine again.

Below was it's first flowering earlier in the spring. I like it anyway, I don't have many yellow flowering cacti so I'll keep it.


Flower = clearly not R. krainziana

If anyone has any other guesses or wants to help confirm or deny the current ID for the cactus Altman's sells as "Rebutia kainziana" please let me know. They all look like this too, I'm sure mine isn't a fluke or labeling switch as everyone's looks and flowers the same.

4 comments:

  1. I wish they would stop with the fake flowers - they do it here too. Nice "real flower"! Great job you did.LT

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    1. Up here most people have never seen a cactus in bloom, so get duped into purchasing one of these if they don't look closely. The fake flowers are ugly compared to what the plant does by itself, but it's impossible to sell that many cacti in bloom year round (if that's the only way to catch people's attention.)

      Oh well, it's no worse than the glitter painted poinsettias or blue dye injected Phalaenopsis. Most people just throw them out when they stop looking good anyway.

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  2. Great photos Melody and beautiful bloom. I've never heard of or seen fake flowers stuck onto cactus before. That's quite humorous. I've seen googly eyes but not fake flowers, Lol. Isn't that misleading promotion?

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    1. Thank you! LOL, googly eyes, well I guess everyone has their was of attracting customers. Glued on flowers is much more misleading though! Whenever I see those I think of the Christopher Walken SNL sketch, hope this video will play for non US viewers:
      http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/googly-eyes-gardener/237389/

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