In article , "David Hare-Scott"
wrote:

"paghat" wrote in message
...
The bright red and bright yellow, orange, black, white, variegated,
striped or blotched barrel cacti (most commonly Gymnocalycium
mihanovichii) have no chlorophyll production of their own and HAVE to be
grafted onto a green cactus to live parasitically. The host is usuall
Hylocereus trigonus.


That's very interesting. I see how such a plant can be propagated but how
did it originate?

CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild
Fauna and Flora) say that:

"The first known colour mutant of a cactus was found in 1941 in Japan.

White ones appeared from a comercial grower in 1940, pink or yellowish red
in 1941, red ('Hibotan') in 1948, and a bright variegated red ('Hibotan
Nishiki') appeared not from a seedling but an offset of one of the first
'Hibotans.' All the others were found among seedlings, all from the same
Japanese grower who dominated the market, Eiji Watanabe, who had first
noticed variegated seedlings in 1938 and began working with them
immediately. The very oldest variegated lineage still exists, it's 'Unjo
Nishiki,' "streaked colors atop clouds," and it can grow without grafting
at all though it should be grafted.

The history wasn't written down for a couple decades and could be iffy.
There was a lot of hybridizing going on which Watanabe didn't record for
posterity or intentionally kept to himself.

It
was a red coloured seedling plant of Gymnocalycium mihanovichii without
chlorophyll (the pigment that gives the green colour to plants). It was kept
alive by grafting, as it would not have been able to survive otherwise."

This sounds strange. How did it even get to be a seedling? Was it saved
while still growing on the stored energy of the seed? I don't know much
about cactus but I would think you would have to be dead lucky. Perhaps it
wasn't a seedling but a bud sport and somebody spotted it and started
grafting.

David

As seedlings they get all their energy from the seed itself and don't need
photosynthesis for a bout four weeks. In the early '50s, it was usually
four-week seedlings that were grafted, carefully chosen because from seeds
you don't always get a cactus like the parent. Amateur growers do more
with tiny offsets, but more advanced amateurs even do cross-breeding
regimens hoping for a dream-discovery among seedlings.

Commercially today they're mostly cloned by tissue-culturing, as it's hard
to get good blooms hence seeds from the mutants, and tissue culturing
results in thousands and thousands of plants of predictable appearance.
Even the offsets aren't predictable for color (I saw a 'Hibotan' with
little baby yellow barrels attached), so tissue cultured specimens are
nearly always what you see in stores now.

-paghat the ratgirl
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