today i thought i would go down to the botanical gardens to see if any cacti were in bloom, and i was pretty disapointed with what i saw. i had just missed there enormous trichocereus spachianus flowers but there werdermannianus had bloomed last night it looked like and there lone globular echinopsis and lone opuntia sp. were flowering along with some barrel cactus.
what i was disapointed with, though, was the poor state of health a lot of the cacti were in including the opuntia having severe black rot on several limbs, most columnar echinopsis/trichocereus including the flowering werd. and some cuzcos, a pc pach, TBM and some terschekiis were all a horrible sickly yellow colour and had pretty bad damage over a lot of them and the lone non pc pach or peruvianus they used to have looks to have been stolen for drug use by someone, which got me down.
another thing i was a little disapointed in was the diversity of there plants, pretty much all being golden barrel cactus or T.terschekii, even though they have what seems a beautifally landscaped place for a great cacti collction.
when i arrived home, i emailed them and informed them of my slight disapointment and made a few recomendations and even offered to volunteer there to look after them myself and source some more diverse cacti for them incuding really spiny/impassable ones to surround any potentially stolen and abused cacti from theft. i hope they let me volunteer, i see a lot of potential from there space.
dionysus