by Richard Pearman

Created on: June 25, 2008   Last Updated: June 26, 2008

Recently, I showed a friend a small cactus with a flower on it and she asked, "What sort of flower is it?" I explained that I don't stick flowers onto my cacti and this was the flower of the cactus. Cacti are angiosperms, flowering plants. They all flower, except for a few screwed up ones. A mature cactus in good conditions should flower every year (perhaps I should explain that I'm only talking about real cacti, the family Cactaceae, not things like Agaves). Some will have a spectacular display for a brief time while others will have a few flowers for much of the year. Therefore it's easy to have flowering cacti, you just have to have mature plants under fairly good conditions. There are many cacti that never grow very big so it's easy to have a mature plant. You've probably noticed that florists and garden centres often have a number of small, roundish cacti with flowers (not stuck on ones). This article is going to be about these small, mostly round, terrestrial (i.e. ones that grow on the ground in deserts or semi-deserts rather than on trees in rain forests) cacti of the sub-family Cactoideae (not prickly pears, chollas etc).

There are some general advantages of this group. They mostly have the fleshy stems and spines you expect of cacti. They're fairly tolerant of neglect and dry, bright conditions. You can get of lot of them into a small space, a windowsill, small greenhouse or a small garden or balcony in a warm climate (a few of them are hardy in very cold climates). In a warm climate they can be used as small, flowering perennials. There are a large number to collect (many people specialize in collecting this group or even particular genera and they normally comprise a large proportion of a general cactus collection). You can often grow flowering size plants from seeds in a couple of years. They have lots of pretty flowers!

I'm going to be using a lot of Latin names as most of these plants don't have common names, you can just Google them for pictures and more information. The first word in the name is the genus and most plants with this first name should be similar. The genus is often abbreviated to the first letter, as long it's obvious.

Generally these plants grow better if they have a cool (between about 0 and 5C) winter rest and they don't like growing all year in a centrally heated house or a tropical climate but there are some exceptions.

It's often said that the North American species are more interesting plants while the South American ones have

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