Whats new?
Posted: Mon Oct 29, 2018 11:26 am
What's new, at least with me? However some of you may not have come across them yet so may be of interest?
I went to the BCSS Zone 3 Rally in the UK at the weekend where Graham Charles gave an excellent talk on Matucana's. Evidently he intends producing a book on them soon.
Graham is a great seed raiser of his and others habitat seed, so he often sells seed raised plants that have not been discovered long, or are not yet common in cultivation.
I obtained plants of Weingartia frey-juckeri, Matucana klopfensteinii and Borzicactus hoxeyi ‘Grandis’ which I could not at the moment have obtained from any of the normal UK dealers (though I see SuccSeed has seeds of the Weingartia).
Weingartia frey-juckeri is interesting in that it is said to look a bit more like a Gymnocalycium body than the more spiny Weingartia ones, but I suppose you could say that about Weingartia fidaiana too. The only decent picture I could find of it on the web was on Pinterest:-
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/322922235756095469/
Matucana klopfensteinii is a tall more cereoid Matucana, described in the Peruvian cactus Journal “Quepo”. The original description is in the link below with an English summary, but the pictures are the same in any language. You need to scroll down a bit for start of article.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gu ... a-Peru.pdf
The only information I can find on the ‘Grandis’ form of B. hoxeyi is from a French web site:-
“And PH 929.02 ( grandis ) which differs (for the moment) by a wider stem, uniformly white and shorter spines. They look like young Haageocereus .”
I have the original Borzicactus (Loxanthocereus) hoxeyi as a grafted plant from Paul. It is a thin cereoid whose the flowers are much smaller than most Borzicactus since it was these small flower remains that first drew Paul's attention to it in habitat I believe, but it flowers small and is quite attractive in flower. It was described in the Cactus Explorers link below on pages 8 to 9:-
http://www.cactusexplorers.org.uk/Explo ... mplete.pdf
Graham was also saying he sent a couple of Matucana roseiflora from collected seed to a Czech grower who isolated them whilst in bud, pollinated them in flower and set seed from them and has so far has produced several thousand seed off these plants for distribution there. That is the way we should now be distributing new species by taking precautions against producing hybrids with leaving them in the collection among related species when in flower. However to be certain of true species you need two authentic plants of the same species and to remove them in bud from the general collection before they flower in order to avoid the chance of open pollination by insects from related species around them and then use a clean pollinating brush or cotton bud reserved for pollinating just that species.
Matucana roseiflora is one of the newer discovered insect pollinated non zygomorphic flowered Matucana's
I went to the BCSS Zone 3 Rally in the UK at the weekend where Graham Charles gave an excellent talk on Matucana's. Evidently he intends producing a book on them soon.
Graham is a great seed raiser of his and others habitat seed, so he often sells seed raised plants that have not been discovered long, or are not yet common in cultivation.
I obtained plants of Weingartia frey-juckeri, Matucana klopfensteinii and Borzicactus hoxeyi ‘Grandis’ which I could not at the moment have obtained from any of the normal UK dealers (though I see SuccSeed has seeds of the Weingartia).
Weingartia frey-juckeri is interesting in that it is said to look a bit more like a Gymnocalycium body than the more spiny Weingartia ones, but I suppose you could say that about Weingartia fidaiana too. The only decent picture I could find of it on the web was on Pinterest:-
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/322922235756095469/
Matucana klopfensteinii is a tall more cereoid Matucana, described in the Peruvian cactus Journal “Quepo”. The original description is in the link below with an English summary, but the pictures are the same in any language. You need to scroll down a bit for start of article.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gu ... a-Peru.pdf
The only information I can find on the ‘Grandis’ form of B. hoxeyi is from a French web site:-
“And PH 929.02 ( grandis ) which differs (for the moment) by a wider stem, uniformly white and shorter spines. They look like young Haageocereus .”
I have the original Borzicactus (Loxanthocereus) hoxeyi as a grafted plant from Paul. It is a thin cereoid whose the flowers are much smaller than most Borzicactus since it was these small flower remains that first drew Paul's attention to it in habitat I believe, but it flowers small and is quite attractive in flower. It was described in the Cactus Explorers link below on pages 8 to 9:-
http://www.cactusexplorers.org.uk/Explo ... mplete.pdf
Graham was also saying he sent a couple of Matucana roseiflora from collected seed to a Czech grower who isolated them whilst in bud, pollinated them in flower and set seed from them and has so far has produced several thousand seed off these plants for distribution there. That is the way we should now be distributing new species by taking precautions against producing hybrids with leaving them in the collection among related species when in flower. However to be certain of true species you need two authentic plants of the same species and to remove them in bud from the general collection before they flower in order to avoid the chance of open pollination by insects from related species around them and then use a clean pollinating brush or cotton bud reserved for pollinating just that species.
Matucana roseiflora is one of the newer discovered insect pollinated non zygomorphic flowered Matucana's