Brachycereus nesioticus
The Galápagos lava cactus, a clumping, densely spined cereoid and one of the first plants to colonise fresh, bare lava. It lives in full equatorial sun, warm and arid at the coast, and is almost never grown outside the islands because collecting is tightly restricted.
Where it grows wild
Grows on young, barren pāhoehoe and ʻaʻā lava flows with almost no soil, rooting into cracks in the rock.
Mostly coastal, near sea level on lava fields; recorded sites are under about 50 m.
🔒 Growing it like that
The wild conditions above, turned into targets for a shelf, a tent or a greenhouse. The full profile has:
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Profiles are drafts built from measured range and climate and from published sources; each section carries its own confidence in the app. Photo from Wikimedia Commons, used under its CC BY-SA 3.0 licence, unmodified.