We have crossed the boundary line into the United States at Nogales, Arizona, and now in the early morning sunlight are approaching the low Gila Range in southeastern Arizona. We have come to study a cactus which closely resembles that fierce little fellow, the Spiny Hedgehog Cactus, from which it differs in having very short and sparse hairs on the fruit and calyx tube. It has been described only recently, and thrives in western Texas, southern New Mexico, old Mexico, and southern Arizona, along the _bajadas_ in rocky or gravelly soil, sometimes in sandy soil on the dry mesas and low mountain sides. Growing in clumps of fifteen to forty stems, four to ten inches tall, pale green or blue-green, it has fourteen or more firm needlelike radial and central spines, pinkish and brownish gray, and bright scarlet flowers bearing six hundred or more stamens, purple anthers, and dull scarlet filaments. Unlike most cactus flowers these blossoms remain open for several days and nights in succession, in April, occasionally blooming into May. The berries ripen in June, dropping their spine clusters then. The fruit of Rose’s Hedgehog Cactus is about an inch long, greenish purple when ripe, edible, with a pleasant, tart, gooseberrylike taste. Fendler’s Hedgehog Cactus (_Echinocereus Fendleri_) _Southeastern Arizona, Mexico, Western Texas, Utah, and New Mexico_ Like many of his kind Fendler’s Hedgehog Cactus blooms during the day and folds up his petals at night. There are eight to thirteen stout radial spines, spreading and occasionally appearing comb-like in arrangement, white fading to gray, and usually tipped with brown; also a very stout central thorn or two, sometimes an inch and a half long, dark-colored and curving upward. He has deep pink, rose and rose-purple bloom nearly four inches long and about as wide, appearing in April and May. This is one of the finest and most abundant of our Strawberry or Hedgehog Cacti; occasionally plants will have as many as fifty blossoms open at a time. Amidst desert surroundings with the gray or brown of the great arid spaces for a background they make a glorious sight, and one wonders how it is possible for so fine a flower to grow on the sandy gravelly foothills without any attention or care from the hand of man. Here again it is Nature, the Great Gardener, with her marvelous science and daring ingenuity, who enables her plants to receive life and sustenance through the miraculous reservoirs of root and stem, even amid the burning sun and drying winds of the great desert of the Southwest.