Welcome to EchinopsisFreak.com/CactusFlowerFreak.com!
The still images and timelapse videos/animated GIFS you’ll find here show Echinopsis cactus flowers blooming, wilting, and just generally strutting their amazing stuff.
While many types of cacti have wonderful flowers, I hope you’ll soon agree that the Echinopsis family of cacti rules the roost.
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Why I Call Them Freaky Flowers
I hope you’ll soon agree that Echinopsis cactus flowers are pretty darn freaky.
There are many funky aspects of these flowers, including:
- Contrast: The striking contrast between the flowers and the spikey plants that spawn them,
- Intensity: Their super bright … often garish … colors and color combinations,
- Timing: The fact they bloom at night, and
- Brevity: The fact these flowers last just a single day from opening until wilting and are at their best for an hour or two tops.
“Echinopsis” is the name for a large family of cacti that originally hails from the hills and mountains of South America, not the desert setting we often associate with cacti. “Echin” comes from the Latin word Ekihnos, which means both sea urchin and hedgehog. (You would think the ancient Romans would have come up with two different words for these very different creatures, but apparently they didn’t.) The “opsis” at the end of Echinopsis is another Latin word, one which means “resembling” or “appearance.” So Echinopsis means “hedgehog resembling” or “sea urchin appearance”, a very accurate description for this genus of cacti that are often ball shaped and sure are covered with hedgehog-like and sea urchin-esq spikes.
In addition to the ~150 Echinopsis species found in the wild, individual collectors have developed hundreds of Echinopsis hybrids over the past century. Much like roses, hybridizers crossbred Echinopsis species and/or older hybrids to create new hybrids that produce flowers in new colors, shapes, and sizes. (Learn much more about numerous Echinopsis species and hybrids and how to care for them at my sister site echinopsis.com.)
Echinopsis flowers range in size from the small (diameters of 1”/2.5 cm) to the massive (diameters over 8”/20 cm). They come in a wide range of colors – whites, pinks, yellows, reds, oranges, and more. The colors of many Echinopsis flowers are so intense, so saturated that it’s literally impossible to look at them for more than a few seconds without averting your eyes.
I hope you enjoy my images and timelapses of these amazing flowers. Thank you for visiting echinopsisfreak.com!
Greg