Escobaria missouriensis a/k/a Missouri Foxtail Cactus, Continuing saga.
I have now located a total of about 70 Escobaria missouriensis cacti in City of Lubbock parks. They tend to occur in groups maybe 10 meters in extent. I have found five such groups, one at Mackenzie Park, and four around Dunbar Lake. The groups are all centered around caliche knolls, ridges, or banks.
I have learned to look on high relatively inaccessible and undisturbed caliche outcrops.
Undisturbed for how long? I do not know how long E. missouriensis lives. Some of the larger Escobaria are surely 50 years old or more. It is possible that the places I am finding Escobaria may never have been broken by plow or graded.
How fire resistant is Escobaria? It is possible too that the places it is found have not been burned or do not support enough grass to fuel a hot prairie fire.
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I must say i never appreciated or even thought about the age of these little cacti!
I've seen people drive their GD trucks over those caliche mounds for no apparent reason. Agree that these are the only sites where we find Mammillaria, Castilleja sessiliflora, etc. It really honks me off.
But people just don't know; they only want to have the driving adventure that was marketed to them on TV!
How do we change this? Save Our Foxtail campaign?
Renaming it lubbockensis would help. Local pride. Missouri -- who cares, go on, squash it. It's like those "drive 90, freeze a yankee" bumper stickers.
On a serious note, still to promote local pride in having an enclave of these survivors from when there was nothing but grassland up into the Dakotas. "Foxtail cactus, a real Texan!"
As to age, a coulpe of years ago my Lace Hedgehog cactus died on me. Had it neglected in a pot outside since the 1970s and it was a mature cactus when bought at the flea market. I am guessing Escobaria are as long-lived as that Echinocereus and I sure find a lot of dead Echinocereus in the parks but not one rotted Escobaria.
All the above speculations hinge on observability. Just because most of these cactus have been found on relatively bare caliche outcrops does not prove they are not elsewhere. I believe it likely, but that is not proven.
To illustrate how difficult these cacti are to see: Years ago while hiking around Dunbar Lake I found an Escobaria missouriensis on top of a caliche knoll. Not quite a year ago I refound it shortly after blooming, photographed it, identified it, and submitted it as an observation here on iNaturalist. At least twice after that I was on that little knoll and failed to see it, concluding it had been dug up and stolen. In March, 2019, I looked again and found it along with several more Escobaria I never found before. They are like a city or island that appears once in an eon and then is gone like a mirage.
Similarly I have found in Lubbock's canyon four Horse Crippler cacti at or near blooming time, but have not been able to refind them since. Do they swell for spring flowering and then shrink to ground level the rest of the year?
Maybe I should fit cacti with radio tracking collars.
Or maybe one can't find them because one is distracted by some other marvelous thing!
Anyhow, over at Landmark, they began flagging plants for Daria's attention. You could hook a whole buch of those silly little marker flags in the alleyways
They do abandon those flags in alleys, never thinking that a dog could run itself through with the wire or stake itself through the belly.
Shouldn't the dogs be more worried about the cactuses? ; )
I meant in alleys. Hate those flags with the wires. Put out an eye, go in the body.
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