well because of other conditions fitting better with each soil.
This helps us to understand how it is that many garden subjects grow
much better when planted in composts often quite different from those
the plants are found in when wild. Few plants have a particular
predilection for soil, and some have what we may call the power to adapt
themselves to conditions often widely different.

In Cactuses we have a family of plants for which special conditions are
necessary; and, as regards soil, whether we are guided by nature or by
gardening experience, we are led to conclude that almost all of them
thrive only when planted in one kind, that soil being principally loam.
Plants which are limited in nature to sandy, sun-scorched plains or the
glaring sides of rocky hills and mountains, where scarcely any other
form of vegetation can exist, are not likely to require much decayed
vegetable humus, but must obtain their food from inorganic substances,
such as loam, sand, or lime. So it is with them when grown in our
houses. They are healthiest and longest-lived when planted in a loamy
soil; and although they may be grown fairly well for a time when placed
in a compost of loam and leaf mould, or loam and peat, yet the growth
they make is generally too sappy and weak; it is simply fat without
bone, which, when the necessary resting period comes round, either rots
or gradually dries up. In preparing soil, therefore, for all Cactuses
(except Epiphyllum and Rhipsalis, which will be treated separately) a
good, rather stiff loam, with plenty of grass fibre in it, should form
the principal ingredient, sand and, if obtainable, small brick rubble
being added--one part of each of the latter to six parts of the former.
The brick rubble should be pounded up so that the largest pieces are
about the size of hazel nuts. Lime rubbish, i.e., old plaster from
buildings, &c., is sometimes recommended for Cactuses, but it does not
appear to be of any use except as drainage. At Kew its use has been
discontinued, and it is now generally condemned by all good cultivators.
Of course, the idea that lime was beneficial to Cactuses sprang from the
knowledge that it existed in large quantities in the soil in which the
plants grew naturally, and it is often found in abundance, in the form
of oxalate of lime, in the old stems of the plants. But in good loam,
lime, in the state of chalk, is always present, and this, together with
the lime contained in the brick r