Urban Jungle Bloggers #27

JOELIX.com | Urban Jungle Bloggers Botanical Zoom cactus

Botanical Zoom! It's quite hilarious how this month's Urban Jungle Bloggers topic fits my life at the moment: Igor and I are in the middle of working on #urbanjunglebook so it's pretty much all about botanicals. And it's all about the details too!

My very favorite plants are (big) cacti: they are tough and grow in the strangest shapes and deepest colors. I don't even mind about the spines I regularly have to Tweezerman from my fingers, they are part of the deal. So for this month's topic, I picked my favorite plants and got close, closer, the closest possible and this is what I saw: the difference between cactus plants and succulents! Did you know all cactus plants are succulents, but not all succulents are cacti? The difference is in the details: the aureoles, those small fluffy cotton-like lumps on the body of a cactus, as you can see in the photo above. Some succulents, like my cactus-look-a-like Euphorbia trigona, do have spines just like cactus plants, but they don't have aureoles. So they are actually succulents and not cacti:

JOELIX.com | Urban Jungle Bloggers Botanical Zoom succulent

Succulent (Euphorbia trigona) versus Cactus (Echinopsis macrogona):

JOELIX.com | Urban Jungle Bloggers Botanical Zoom succulent versus cactus

By the way, a tip if you want to repot a cactus plant without covering your hands in painful spines or glochids (worse!): use a few layers of magazine paper to cover the plant. I've used seveveral kinds of gloves (and destroyed them because I couldn't remove the glochids (those short hairy sprickles some cactus have instead of spines), but magazine paper works better for me.

Don't you love the starry pattern on this cactus plant?

JOELIX.com | Urban Jungle Bloggers Botanical Zoom cactus

Urban Jungle Bloggers is a monthly series hosted by 2 bloggers: Igor (Happy Interior Blog) and Judith (JOELIX.com). Every month we share ideas to create an urban jungle through styling ideas, DIYs and green tips & tricks. You can find additional inspiration on our Urban Jungle Bloggers Pinterest board and keep up-to-date via Facebook or Instagram. Want to join? Find out how on our website and use #urbanjunglebloggers on twitter and instagram. Let's bring some green into our homes and blogs!

For more Botanical Zoom, check out the gallery!

20 thoughts on “Urban Jungle Bloggers #27

    1. Thanks Yvonne! It's so fun to learn all kinds of new things about plants while investigating for the book. (I did know about the aureoles though ;) ).

  1. I love cacti and spines' pattern the same, so I used close up pictures too but did not resist the temptation to re-draw them.
    The closer you look, the more beautiful patterns you see. Too good to be true for a graphic designer, isn't it?
    Beautiful plants Judith, I always so amazed by your collection :-)

    1. Merci Morgane ! Les cactus m'intriguent toujours autant. Et tes bébés vont bien d'ailleurs ! J'attends que les Oxalis reprennent un peu de forces, mais les sedum et la Pilea ont l'air de se plaire ici dans l'Oise :) xx

  2. You cactus queen. It's actually hard to re-pot them.

    I only have little ones because don't have the space or height for big ones.
    I know the remedy for that…. I'm off to see the lovely Jin at Conservatory Archives in an hour or so. I get my big cacti fix there:-))

    1. Hihi, very curious to find out if you got your big cactus fix at Jin's! Always love the biggest cacti, but smaller ones are nice too, especially if you pair them with different sizes and colours. Off to read more of your botanical zoom now! xx

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