The Cactus Trip Diaries

Wednesday 19 August 2015 – BCSS Somerset Branch

Another one of my regular annual appearances. For some reason I tend to refer to them as ‘Taunton Branch’ as they meet in the town by that name, in the County of Somerset. I’m due back again next year, assuming that travel plans do not get in the way.

BCSS Somerset Branch – Taunton

As usual this year Part 1 of tonight’s presentation was ‘Presentations – Australian Succulenticon in Brisbane and February C&S Society meetings in California and Nevada’ and introduced the audience through my new hobby – pottery, inspired by seeing excellent plants in great pots at the USA meetings.

The Monthly Table Show (top left table in the background) featured a most unusual entry. Yes, it was in a plastic point but it would have been to check its pot size. The cardboard wrapping was aimed at protecting the plant in transit – the Crassula’s leaf was covered in attractive white farina. However, getting the plant into the box had proven more difficult than expected and its owner decided against taking the plant out of the box without damaging both plant and box. I awarded him second prize, even if under strict BCSS Rules I should perhaps have disqualified the entry. I believe that his effort to bring in the very nice plant should be awarded and checked with the Show Secretary that this was OK. I wonder if the plant had been potted in a heavier ceramic pot, reducing the risk of the pot toppling over, the cardboard box might have been redundant.

          Table show entry
I did not see a Novelty Pot class!

Friday 14 August 2015 – BCSS Waltham Forest Branch

I am not quite sure when I first gave a presentation at Waltham Forest. I know that at the time I had to look up the address on Google Maps and was pleasantly surprised that although it was a fair distance away from home, I should be able to get back home at a reasonable time, some two and a half hours.

The journey from home was the usual night mare to be expected on a Friday afternoon on the M3 and M25, the London ring road. It took 5 hours and I arrived 10 minutes after the members had opened the hall, leaving 20 minutes to set up – ample time. It should take much less time to get home on empty roads.

Not this time! Just 45 minutes away from home, on the M3, we were unceremoniously directed off the motorway. I lost the diversion signs after the third roundabout with SatNav being very sure that I should go back and pick up the blocked road again.

                                                BCSS Waltham Forest Branch

Tuesday 11 August 2015 – BCSS Stoke-on-Trent Branch

As in previous years, my second ‘gig’ of this mini tour of The Potteries took me to Stoke-on-Trent where a friend of many years, Maurice Williams would be my host. The number of glasshouses had greatly increased since my last visit a few years ago. The main feature was still a large collection of Matucana. There were many plants that looked very similar but with large labels recording many of the locations where the ex-habitat plants had come from – very mature plants from the days when it was still legal to import such plants and younger plants raised from ex-habitat seed a real collection aimed at studying the plants and to learn the similarities and affinities between the taxa and how to distinguish each from the other. I have a similar, but much smaller collection given to me by my good friend Bart Hensel from the Netherlands.

As is the case with most hobby collections the rarest thing to find is ‘Space’ Although I have visited Peru, they area where we travelled south of the capital Lima, the Matucana occur farther to the north and to the east. Another good friend, Leo van der Hoeven, had shown me pictures of his Peru adventures, one of which had been with Maurice, so I was at least in broad terms familiar with the genus and its habitat.

I grow my plants outside from mid-May to late September / early October, depending on when I set out on my own cactus adventures. During the winter, the whole collection is squeezed into my conservatory where the display crates are placed on racks, 3 to 5 shelves high with every other window panel able to tilt or fully open to provide plenty of air circulation as and when the weather allows. My new pottery hobby encouraged me to combine a stock take with an exercise of moving some plants from sometimes oversized plastic pots and trays into smaller ceramic pots. When I looked at the dozen or more Matucana haynei and M. weberbaueri taking up my display trays and wondered how they would all fit back into the Conservatory in months to come. I decided to surprise Maurice and make him a gift of these plants. Sadly, most had lost their labels – not important for an expert who had grown the many plants in the genus for many year. Sadly, with the names, the all important habitat data had also gone. Still, Maurice had soon found enough space to give my gift (originally Bart’s gift) a good home and once thoroughly studied might join the sales plants and perhaps benefit the Branch.

After a nice bite to eat at the local Toby Carvery we thought that we might be pushing it a bit, arriving at 19:10, but in fact turned out to be 20 minutes early.

Again the What I Saw Last Winter turned out to be a great success and resulted for another visit this time next year that I was happy to accept, subject to my travel plans falling into place.

       BCSS Stoke-on-Trent branch

After the meeting we returned to Maurice’s where he impressed me with a nice bottle of Italian wine – I normally prefer Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon or Argentinian Malbec must will readily admit that I am by no means a wine buff and that much of the pleasure comes from the memories of visits to the countries where the wines hail from.

As the sun was now in a better angle we returned to Maurices greenhouses where it seemed that not only had his collection grown, but also the range of plants that now included Ariocarpus, Thelocactus and Stenocactus/Echinofossulocactus, many with ex-habitat information before setting off on my journey back to Wiltshire.

Maurice Williams and part of his collection of Matucana

Monday 10 August 2015 – BCSS Macclesfield Branch

                                   BCSS Macclesfield Branch

The Macclesfield Branch is the first of my annual trip to the Potteries – an appropriate name given my new found interest in pottery, related of course to cactus pots.

It just so happens that my recommended supplier of clays is Valentine Clays who are based in Stoke-on-Trent. They were extremely helpful when I returned from my little speaking tour in California, where I picked up the Pottery bug and after some research came up with suitable clays available in the UK that compared to the clays used in California by Tom Glavitch who was kind enough to give me some insights to making the pots he makes. ‘It really is no rocket science!’ he told me, before admitting that he work at the Mars Project for NASA. However, he is not on the rocket building side! He also warned me that the first 1,000 pots that I’d make would not be good enough to use, but probably due to the teaching of our private potter in the UK, Jennie Gilbert, my first eight efforts have all proved good enough for me to use for plants in my own collection.

So it comes as no surprise that I made a quick visit to Valentine Clays to buy a special clay that I had seen a sample of at their Exeter distributor. Time only allowed a brief visit but it was good to check out the place as it is a small but well stocked industrial unit rather than a large shop and showroom where I could have shopped for pottery tools and some of the pottery samples displayed on their website. I had planned to come back on the way home if there had been any exciting browsing facilities.

I arrived at my hosts for the night, Margaret and Alasdair Glenn. One of the nice aspects of my presentations is the great hospitality I am treated to at every branch. I really don’t want to single out any one in particular as I’m bound to overlook somebody but will mention any special collections that I come across and where I obtain permission to share the experience – not everyone is willing to show off their plants – unfortunately there have been some incidents where plants have been stolen.

The next day Margaret and Alasdair take me around some member collections and this time, as often in the past, we visited the collection of Chair Person Julia. She has a large Auracaria tree in her garden and in the past had given me fruits (or are they seeds?)  that sadly failed to germinate. This time I was given some seeds that had already germinated in the tray where they had been left and forgotten after coming from the tree. They have been potted and look to be enjoying life.

These visits are often followed by lunch at a nearby pub. This time, due to a comedy of errors I lost contact with the lead car, turned back to Julia’s who had already disappeared. The nearest pub/restaurant with the same name was reported by SatNav to be 51 miles away – so clearly not where we supposed to lunch. I do not possess a mobile phone, so had no numbers to contact or anything to contact them with – phone boxes have all but disappeared and if found are usually vandalised.

So I resolved to go to my next contact point in the hope that he would be home so early – he was!

Copiapoa ahremephiana N.P.Taylor & G.J.Charles

All material, except where otherwise credited, is Copyright
© 2001-2015 Paul Klaassen

Monday 2 March 2015 – London Heathrow to Amesbury, UK

Oops, quite a break since my last posting so suffice to say that I’ll fill in the gaps in days to come and confirm that I’ve arrived safely back in the UK where Spring has arrived causing an explosion of tree pollen so that I’m again battling itchy streaming eyes with antihistamine tablets.

Thanks for your patience.

Saturday 8 November 2014 – San Miguel de Allende to Mexico International Airport

We had plenty of time to complete our final packing, stroll around the streets some more and buy more small souvenirs to fill up the holes in my luggage. Bart felt fully recovered and, having done such a magnificent job getting us out of Mexico City on arrival, volunteered for the job as driver for the final journey to the Airport.

Soon out of San Miguel de Allende we began to see first small- then larger groups of ‘Mexican Cowboys’ – I must find out what the term for people on horseback, probably involved in the cattle trade, is in Mexico. Gaucho’s? Anyway, there were hundreds, no thousands of them. Many of them were in festive dress, wearing very colourful clothes and their horses too were dressed for a fiesta! What was going on?

Back in the UK, Alain had found an internet article about the ‘Cabalgata of Christ the King’, a tradition since 1927 when the Cristeros war started. The images on the ionternet certainly look identical of what we saw for many miles alongside the road. But the Cabalgata procession is said to take place 2 days before Epiphany so some 2 months after we saw our procession. Was it a rehearsal? Who knows.

I had a shock being unable to find the images and movies that I had taken of the event, until Alain reminded me that as I had already packed my camera for the flight home, I used his camera to record the proceedings from the prime position of the front passenger seat.

Driving back seemed a lot easier than the drive out of Mexico City as the road to the Airport was clearly marked and understood (Aeroporto T1) with a route that SatNav mostly agreed with. Common sense dictated that we’d follow SatNav where there were no signs but followed the signs, assumed to be more up to date than SatNav.

We left San Miguel de Allende at noon and aimed to arrive at 16:00 for flights leaving around 23:00 hrs. We actually arrived at 16:30, due to slow traffic once we hit the Mexico DF border. The car was welcomed back by Hertz, it had served us very well indeed!

We said our goodbyes, as Alain and Bart were due to leave from T1, where the Hertz return garage was based, while I hopped on the Airport train that took me back to T2, where we had originally arrived. I managed to drop off my hold luggage and then found a seat where I could clearly see the Departures board and opened up my laptop to start writing up the Holiday notes.

The noticeboard suggested a departure time of 23:00, 40 minutes earlier than shown on my flight documents. My laptop ran out of power and I tried a local charging point that turned out to be disconnected. Then the notice board announced my departure gate, of course at the other end of the airport, so I quickly packed everything into my rucksack and legged it to Gate 68. nce I arrived back home I realised that  my laptop charger was still at Mexico Airport and that a Microsoft replacement charger costs an eye-watering £65. Why so much?

Never mind. We had a great trip and I plan to do it all again in 2015!

Wednesday 5 November 2014 – Visit to Xichu

The ‘rolled up piza in a roll’ that we had last night had not agreed with Bart, who after several visits to the toilet and running a bit of a temperature decided to have a rest day, while Alain and I visited Xichu for a look at the Turbinicarpus alonsoi.

The first images of the day were again a study in Topes, the humps and bumps that certainly don’t benefit travellers in cars with back problems. Here I focussed on the metal balls, half burried that cause a jarr to the back bone.

S3212 was a No Cactus stop in the Zona de Niebla in the Valle de Xichu, as I misjudged the next stop S3213, where we checked on the Mammillaria muehlenpfordtii seen here on previous occasions. They were still there, although I’m not sure for how much longer as rocks along the road seem to be ground down and used to build the roads and reinforce more formidable rock faces. There was a lot of evidence of rock fall during this trip – signs of regular minor earth quakes or of a reduction in the budgets to clear the roads from natural erosion?

S3214 combined pictures of plants growing along the rock cutting as we drove out of Xichu towards the T. alonsoii. Here too the roadside rocks had been cut up to make space for concrete poles to cary elecytricity and / or telephony I assume. There certainly was not the variety of plants here that we had seen in March. Waling into the canyon where the plants grew it did not take long to find the first plants. They looked to have had a good year and were plumped up, but not in flower. On the opposite, shaded wall, there were mopre Mammillaria schiedeana than I remember seeing before – all small UK nursery seized , I do not recall seeing large plants in nature. These plants seem to live ion almost permanent shade, so don’t be fooled in giving these Mexican plants the full sun treatment in the UK.

Mammillaria schiedeana (S3214)

As we were about to to return to the car, Alain mentioned that we had company. As I looked in the direction indicated I saw a white somprero ducking behind the shrubs. I called out ‘Buenos dias, Senor’ but there was no reply. We carried on strolling back, taking pictures of plants spotted as we went. Near the canyon’s exit our Mexican frien reappeared and gave us a talk in much too fast Spanish for us to understand that we needed permission to be on this private land. We were surprised that this was private land as, unlike his land across the road, there were no fences or signs to indicate this. I said that in Europe where we came from unfenced land without signage was considered common land for all people to enjoy. We then said sorry. We left with a friendly hand shake, but heeded his comments that ther Policia or worse, vigilantes, might have caught us with dire consequenses.

On the way back to San Jose Iturbide, Alain wanted to make a comfort stop and then called me over to take a look at a cactus growing behind the tree that he had selected for his privacy. There on the ground was a cactus that I had been aware grew in this area but that we had never found: Ferocactus macrodiscus ssp. septentrionalis. It was certainly not a show plant by any means, but it was still nice top add another taxon to our species list of plants seen in nature. Where there is one, there should be more, so we took a stroll along the edge of the field across the road where Alain found another group of four, growing among and hidden by the tall grass. There were people working in the fields some distance away and remembering the words of the old man in Xichu we decided not to cross the new fence to do a bit of gardening to expose the plants.

Alain had discovered a great restaurant at Hotel Los Arcos on the town square where the two of us enjoyed Marguaritas and Steak while Bart was well enough to join us for chicken soup.

We hope that Cliff, Ian and Sarda safely got away on their flight