Red-headed Irishman

Grows extremely well here in the Las Vegas scorching heat. Both are planted in my SW facing yard but one is covered with burlap during th...Read Moree heat of the summer and the second one gets filtered light from the fronds of one of my palm trees. In the winter I just put a styrofoam cup on top for good measures just to be on the safe side.

I wonder if someone can changed the hardiness of this plant? I was afraid I was going to lose this with a hard freeze of 13 and several m...Read Moreore in the low 20's but to my surprise I didn't!

This plant grows very well for me, except I want to point out that you need to watch the sun exposure because mine got sunburned quickly ...Read Moreon one side until I moved it. It prefers bright light but not direct sun on the plant.

The subspecies 'spinosissima' only rarely grows higher than 12 inches. It has dirty white spines and does not have the bristles in the ax...Read Moreils most of the time.
The subspecies 'tepoxlana' has yellow spines.
The subspecies 'pilcayensis' has whiter spines and the stems can grow to 20 inches long/high. It might have some latex/bristles in the axils.
The flowers are purple-pink on all subspecies.

Another synonym of this plant is Mammillaria haasii