I understand that Carnegia is considered to be somewhat slow-growing (well, compared to Cereus or Trichocereus anyway). Just how slow are we talking here? A couple of inches per year? I'd love to have a crack at growing a saguaro, one day...
Lachy wrote:How old (roughly) would such a plant be?
I understand that Carnegia is considered to be somewhat slow-growing (well, compared to Cereus or Trichocereus anyway). Just how slow are we talking here? A couple of inches per year? I'd love to have a crack at growing a saguaro, one day...
My guess would be somewhere between 100 and 150 years.
they say that these cacti don't branch till they are 65 to 75 years old. i'm just guessing that this one is about 200 years old. up close it has a lot of holes in it. when i walked up to it a lot of different kinds of birds flew away.
The standard rule of thumb for wild ones is an inch a year. No doubt they can exceed this occasionally but its somewhere to start guessing. Some estimates for larger plants are as high as four inches a year.
One thing I've noticed about habitat Saguaros is that the ones growing on hillsides are often plumper and healthier than the ones growing on the plain below.
--Unless there is a wash cutting through, and then the ones nearer the wash resemble those on the hillsides.
I guess it must have something to do with the subsurface movement of water in the soil (?)
I have seen quite small saguaros in very harsh habitats that I imagine are quite old. Some only seem to grow about an inch every 5 years or so. On the other hand, very lush and healthy looking ones put on as much as 5-6" a year, especially, as Tom pointed out, if they are in washes.
This one I'd say is about 200-250 years old, depending on the habitat.