Word: cactus
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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There were also a few Mexican artists of ability who had never paid much attention to politics. Two of these last week had one-man shows in Manhattan. They were 48-year-old Carlos Merida, who painted cactus and Aztec idols before Rivera did and 32-year-old Expatriate Federico Cantú, who dwells in Greenwich Village...
Baldish, roly-poly Federico Cantú, once an apprentice of Muralist Rivera, filled 57th Street's Guy Mayer Gallery more conventionally, with cactus, horses, ban-doleered soldiers and bedraggled peons. Best painting: a tropically rank portrait of Mexican Singer Aurelia Colomo (see cut), who carols tropically in the bar of Manhattan's Hotel Weylin...
Filming a desert forced landing, newlywed Cinemactress Bette Davis hopped as she was supposed to out the plane door, landed as she was not supposed to, derry-down-dilly in a cactus bush. A doctor tweezered out 45 spines...
North and South American prickly pears, members of the cactus family, were taken to Australia in the 19th Century, planted for hedges and as a source of fodder. By 1925 they threatened to crowd out native vegetation on 30,000,000 acres of land, and on 30,000,000 more acres the pears had completely won, standing in a dense, solid growth two to five feet thick. The cost of fighting them with chemicals, by digging or plowing, stacking and burning, would have been more than the land was worth. So, year after year, more land was abandoned, more homesteads...
Meanwhile the Australian Government sent agents to the Americas to see what the prickly pear's natural enemies were. The agents investigated about 150 insects that feed on cactus and nothing else, set a few of the most promising to work in Australia. By far the most potent destroyer proved to be a little moth borer, Cactoblastis cactorum. The larvae of this insect eat the inside of the pear plant, even the roots, and their depredations promote rotting due to bacteria and fungi. Armed with strings of moth borer eggs glued to strips of paper, fieldworkers swarmed through prickly...