Oh, ol spiky flappy fucker. My late grandfather loved growing succulents, and when I was a teen he “gifted” some to my parents by just planting small clippings he brought with him in their flower beds. Lovely flowers and bushes arranged to mimic home and gardening magazines, with some mean spiky fucker just sprouting out of somewhere random near the edge. It looked ridiculous and always made me smile. Little intensely angry gremlins perched on the side of flower arrangements.

The best part was watching my poor dad try to dig them up and put them in pots so they could be out of the flower beds and shoved inside with the indoor plants, at my mom’s request. It’d look like my dad had it stable, then the whole cactus would tip over and get him like there was some small imp in it that just wanted to prick him. I think the third time he finally started using bigger pots so they’d just collapse on the potting soil instead of his hands.

Had one that looked like this for quite a while that never made it insidd the house. Think it finally died one winter when we got stuck with a few feet of snow for a week or more.

Whereabouts? I recently saw something like this growing in someone’s front yard in eastern Massachusetts, and that made me recall my dad once showing me cactus growing on a mountaintop in northern New Jersey as a kid, much to my surprise.