Scaled image p87.webp

Echinofossulocactus sulphureus    8/4/21
This is yet another cristate form out of the same seed batch. I originally sowed 100 seeds and I now have 15 normal plants which have been flowering all year round (winters in my greenhouse) for five years. I've collected 5000 seeds so far. I'd have about double that if the local ants would stop stealing the seeds. I think it's remarkable how quickly they can cart off 50 or so seeds from a plant, including the matrix in which the seeds ripened.
The matrix is what happens to the unused umbilical cords of the unfertilized seeds. When you eat a fruit like an apple, the part you think of as the apple actually originated as umbilical cords for the embryos that were not fertilized at flowering. Actually, every seed-bearing fruit has some version of the umbilical cords in the fruit. I'm pretty sure that sex was invented only once. My evidence is that there is a nearly perfect analogy between plant sex and animal sex. People are technically "animals."
I also have, of course the two cristates just pictured and an unknown, which follows. The plant here illustrated was just a tangled mass of white baby spines until this year. The apparently normal growing head appeared this spring, but it seems to have stopped in the juvenile form, so far. That is, the new spines on the normal (?) head are not the dark and flat mature form spines. Note all the horizontally elongated meristems so characteristic of cristate forms. For what it's worth, the two cristates are about five times the volume of their 15 normal (?) siblings.   (086/112)   

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