This unique reference work presents the first comprehensive taxonomy of Coryphantha, with a complete key to the genus. It contains a new taxonomic classification of all 43 species and 11 subspecies, with morphological and ecological descriptions. These cacti, which grow in Mexico and southern USA, are characterized by their typical grooved tubercles and large flowers. The book is the result of many years of viewing the literature and fieldwork by the author team and their ongoing commitment to map out the nomenclature of this genus. During this process, the authors even discovered some new plants. More than 300 high-quality colour photos showing the various cacti and their habitats as well as distribution cards and illustrations explaining the morphological details complement the text. Written in an easy-to-follow style and with a chapter on cultivation conditions, the work will not only be an invaluable reference manual for taxonomists and horticulturalists but also for hobbyists and plant collectors.

The saguaro, with its great size and characteristic shape—its arms stretching heavenward, its silhouette often resembling a human—has become the emblem of the Sonoran Desert of southwestern Arizona and northwestern Mexico. The largest and tallest cactus in the United States, it is both familiar and an object of fascination and curiosity. This book offers a complete natural history of this enduring and iconic desert plant. Gathering everything from the saguaro’s role in Sonoran Desert ecology to its adaptations to the desert climate and its sacred place in Indigenous culture, this book shares precolonial through current scientific findings. The saguaro is charismatic and readily accessible but also decidedly different from other desert flora. The essays in this book bear witness to our ongoing fascination with the great cactus and the plant’s unusual characteristics, covering the saguaro’s: history of discovery, place in the cactus family, ecology, anatomy and physiology, genetics, and ethnobotany. The Saguaro Cactus offers testimony to the cactus’s prominence as a symbol, the perceptions it inspires, its role in human society, and its importance in desert ecology.

This bibliography is a guide to the literature on Mexican flowering plants, beginning with the days of the discovery and conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards in the early sixteenth century.

A masterful reconstruction of one of the worst Indian massacres in American history In April 1871, a group of Americans, Mexicans, and Tohono O?odham Indians surrounded an Apache village at dawn and murdered nearly 150 men, women, and children in their sleep. In the past century the attack, which came to be known as the Camp Grant Massacre, has largely faded from memory. Now, drawing on oral histories, contemporary newspaper reports, and the participants? own accounts, prize-winning author Karl Jacoby brings this perplexing incident and tumultuous era to life to paint a sweeping panorama of the American Southwest?a world far more complex, diverse, and morally ambiguous than the traditional portrayals of the Old West.

An updated edition of the cult classic, featuring stunning archival photographs of hundreds of the rarest and most spectacular plants on Earth, taken by a motley crew of cactus obsessives “A catalogue of wonders that most of us will never get to see in person.”—The New Yorker From the people behind Cactus Store comes Xerophile, a photographic collection of these improbable desert wonders in the wild. Drawing on the archives of twenty-five cactus obsessives—from PhD botanist to banker, art teacher to cancer researcher—this revised edition spans eighty years and features new and expanded descriptive notes for all 350+ photos. Xerophile brings together eighty years’ worth of these explorers’ remarkable images from some of the world’s most remote habitats: a peculiar two-leaved plant that lives for millennia in the deserts of Namibia; succulents whose poisonous sap is used by hunters to fell large game in Angola; and cactus that live on snow-covered mountains in Bolivia, sink below ground level to survive droughts in Mexico, are pollinated by bats in Brazil, and grow in pure lava fields of the Galápagos Islands.