Cactus and Succulent Journal

On the cover

One of the joys for succulent lovers is discovering succulent plants wherever we go. Morocco harbors only about 60 succulent species over its nearly 250,000 km2, but its vast, arid mountain ranges hold some real gems that aren’t too hard to find. Here Brian Lamb and company report on a productive Moroccan field trip carried out after heavy rains. The trip was focussed mainly on locating some of the rare and cryptic succulent milkweeds found there, but some conspicuous and charismatic succulents are to be found along the way, including our cover-model, Euphorbia echinus, kept beauty-queen thin girdled between slabs of shale (photo by Leslie Linares). This is one of three mounding Euphorbia species found in the Atlas Mountains. The others are E. resiniferum, which Russell Wagner saw on his recent trip to Morocco (see page 235), and E. officinarum. And each of these has local variants, some of which may be worthy of formal recognition. In this issue we offer a glimpse of travel in a country whose delights extend well beyond the botanical.