Counting (lots of!) Cactus Flowers
Last week I wrote about seeing (and counting) Red Velvet Mites in our yard the morning after the first good monsoon rain of the summer. That’s not the only Monsoon Magic we have around here! Within a week of a good summer rain, we see a lot of Pincushion Cactus flowers in our yard—and I mean a LOT—so this became the latest subject for my Perpetual Journal.
You’ll notice that I counted 645 Pincushion Cactus flowers last week on July 23. I have a fun habit of walking around our yard on the one day each summer I think we’ll have the highest number of Pincushion (Mammillaria, or “Mamm” as I call them) flowers and counting the flowers.
I have to admit that in a few previous years the weather was just toooo oppressive to be outside counting the flowers and I decided to skip my Mamm count those years. The weather was, to quote Gurney Halleck from Dune: Part One, “Brutal!” The sci-fi fans amongst us know he wasn’t talking about the weather but his word choice is very apropos for the weather as well! ☹️
Vintage 😉 Paula Art with a Special Guest!
A few years ago I carried my first drawing of a Mammillaria in bloom out into our yard and photographed it on the ground with a Special Guest—a live Mammillaria in bloom. As you see, the live version was inspecting my rendition of one of its kind and I’m confident it gave me a many-spines-up rating! 😉 This “vintage” art (just like my Red Velvet Mite vintage art from last week) is from 2016 and is also from my first sketchbook! 😃
So How Did I Count All These Flowers?
I'm sure some of you are thinking, "Gee, Paula, how did you count all these flowers? In your head? Or did you use an app?" The answers to those questions are: no, and no!
I use a very handy-dandy antique counting device called a Veeder-Root hand held mechanical counter. I push the thumb lever on the top and the count on the display advances by one. Here’s a photo of my counter from a few summers ago.
Yes, you read that number right: 1206! That’s the highest number of Mamm flowers I’ve counted in our yard on a single day, which in this case was July 8, 2021.
Hubby tells me that birders who need to count a large number of birds (like birders participating in hawk watches) use hand held counters—and some birders even use multiple counters on one hand to keep track of multiple species of hawks! Wowza! 😲
Speaking of counting and numbers, I’d love to have a larger number of subscribers for this email newsletter (nice segue, huh?), so if you can think of anyone else who might enjoy it, please share this with them! Thank you!
Wowza! 👍🏜️