Good buy?

SWMBO and I took our German neighbours to a few garden centres recently. They were looking for a new palm to replace one lost to the dreaded Red Palm Weevil and an alternative to their straggly bouganvilla.

In one of the centres, I spotted a set of three large cacti. Way out of my price range, I imagined, but I went over to have a closer look and to check the price anyway.  It was marked at just 47 euro, which I thought must be a mistake, but when I asked about it, I was told that as it was marked at that price, I could buy it at that price. So I did. (And then I paid more than that for the pot!)

It was delivered a couple of days ago and I wanted to know just what I had bought. As is the wont here in Spain, most garden centres do not mark cacti and are of little help in identifying them, so I placed a pleading post on the Cactus World Online forum and within less than an hour had the name I was searching for: Pachycereus pringlei.

The tallest of the three parts stand 90cm. with an almost unbelievable maximum circumference of 70cm.

As well as the portrait view, you might enjoy a top view of one of the stems and a closeup of an areole with its spines.

A good buy, I think.

Good bye.

Ruby Dracaena draco

On 29 October (just two days time, as I write), She Who Must Be Obeyed and He Whose Task Is Simply To Obey (that's me, in other words) will have been married 40 years. We've known each other for over 45 years, but that's a different story.

40 years. So it seems that this is our ruby wedding anniversary. To celebrate this wondrous occasion, we decided yesterday to buy ourselves a Dracaena draco, otherwise known as the Dragon's Blood tree. Well, blood is red, which is the colour of ruby, or so I'm told, so it seems appropriate, especially as this particular specimen was looking rather lonely and forlorn in one of the local garden centres, so clearly needed a good home.

The stem is about a metre tall, which makes the plant about 15 years old. We've had it potted up in a good earthenware pot and it now looks happy in our ever-more overcrowded little garden, standing next to its fellow countryman, the Senecio kleinia, which is seen to the left of the photo.

Both these plants originate from the Canary Islands, with the Dracaena also being found in Madeira, the Cape Verde Islands, and the Azores.

If you have visited Tenerife, the chances are that you have seen one of the few Dragon trees to still grow in the wild: a specimen estimated to be about 1,000 years old is a tourist attraction in the village of Icod de los Vinos. It is, of course, just a tad larger than our own…