I'm pretty new to this cacti thing and easily fooled. I was at Wal*Mart this evening and surprised to see they had a cactus collection, and most of them had flowers. 'How on earth did they get all these cacti to flower so young at the same time?' in wondered. I assumed they pumped them full of hormones and the cacti wouldn't survive for more than a few weeks. This is possibly true, but as for the flowers, I finally realized THEY WERE GLUING FAKE FLOWERS ONTO THE CACTI!
Regardless, I'm kind of impressed with what they had. I didn't buy anything, but I took lots of pictures, including one of a fake flower that they didn't glue on correctly.
Some of the cacti that people are bringing across the Mexican border here In El Paso, Texas are also mutilated. However, the Mexican growers are more frugal. They place the plants at times into emptied aluminum beer bottles. The strawflowers, spray painted in all colors imaginable, are not glued on - that costs time and money - but they are just jabbed into the hapless Aloe or cactus plant.
Most of the people who buy these plants probably do not even know, that the flowers come from a different kind of plant, and with the cacti or Aloe plants being placed in a pine needle growing medium, the strawflower will most likely outlast the cactus. Well, it was only a cheap souvenir anyway.
It's a cheap souvenir that buyers have to pay an extra $1.50 for.
Like @7george said, some can be salvaged. I've found that using rubbing alcohol as a solvent for dissolving the glue works very well. It does not damage the plant and removes most of the glue without damaging the growth tip.
That's a horrendous thing that is unfortunately, more common that any cactophile would dream. And it is even worse, I have seen cacti sprayed with glitter, to match a valentine's day heart, opuntia leaves heart shaped/cut, painted succulents, and it is getting more disgusting by the years. In fact, I run away from all the places that have such "treated" plants, as buying from those places only encourages sellers to find more freaky ways to sell cacti and sucs to the public. You can use tweezers to pick the flowers out, carefully, one by one.
"The best fertilizer is the gardener's own shadow"
Chinese proverb
I have "rescued" two cacti that had had a Santa hat stabbed into the stem and googly eyes glued on
I often buy the plants that have been reduced and thrown in the bargain bin, I am a sucker and feel sorry for them
Yes, the point of these things is they are just impulse buys for most of the public to be treated like a bunch of cut flowers or flowering bulbs at Christmas which go straight into the bin after a time, being a dust trap on the windowsill or they snag the curtains. At least we have moved forward in that they are now labelling them as straw flowers or grafts. In the past they did not glue the flowers on but had a wire spike they stuck into the plant which often caused rot.
With regards to rescue, well as long as plant tissue is still alive it can always be used for propagation in order to obtain a sound plant, even if that means waiting for enough clean growth to cut off and re-root, or "blinding" the crown to encourage it to send out clean offsets to re-root and start afresh.
Even heavily mealybug or red spider infested plants can be propagated rather than thrown away when the normal insecticides don't seem to work if the roots are cleaned off and the whole plant completely plunged under methylated spirits in a container for a few minutes then washed off and planted. I have not yet found any mealy bug that survived the Meth's plunge treatment. The plants look battered and dejected afterwards and often with soil stuck to them but will usually either send out new growth at the crown or produce offsets which can be taken off and started again.
In the UK it s called "methylated spirits."
In the US, "denatured alcolhol."
From Wikipedia: Denatured alcohol, also called methylated spirits, is ethanol that has additives to make it poisonous, extremely bad tasting, foul smelling or nauseating, to discourage recreational consumption. In some cases it is also dyed."
Good to know some plants are too rare to just give up on.
I think a 10-20 minute soak in any liquid would eventually suffocate insects. The stronger the liquid, the better.
Cheap vodka would probably do the trick too
There are more cacti in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
One of the few cactus lovers in Lebanon (zone 11a)