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Cactaceae family

Johnson's Fishhook Cactus Echinomastus johnsonii

Native

Johnson's Fishhook Cactus is a perennial shrub native to the lower 48 states.

More about this plant

Sclerocactus johnsonii is a species of cactus known by the common names Johnson's beehive cactus and Johnson's fishhook cactus. It is native to the southwestern United States from eastern California to Utah and northwestern Mexico, where it can be found in desert scrub habitat. It produces an egg-shaped or cylindrical stem up to 25 centimetres tall by 10 centimetres wide. It is covered densely in straight and curving spines which may be up to 4 centimetres long and come in shades of yellow, gray, lavender, and pink or red, with up to 24 per areole. The cactus may have yellow or pink flowers; the species is sometimes divided into two varieties on the basis of flower color. Flowers are up to 8 centimetres wide. The scaly, fleshy fruit is up to 1.8 centimetres long. Wikipedia →

Growing & care

USDA PLANTS · TRY
Conditions
Sources · Conditions
Cold hardiness (derived) — Hardiness
Hardiness
≥ zone 8 derived from its U.S. range
Size & form
Sources · Size & form
USDA PLANTS — Lifespan
McKenzie et al. 2025 — community-science image analysis (MIT) — Flower colour
Lifespan
Perennial
Flower colour
Pink AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
In the garden
Shrub layer — Sits in the shrub of a layered food forest or polyculture.Open guide →
derived roles
AI = read by an AI vision model · DERIVED = a computed estimate, not a direct measurement. The “How we know this” section below details each.
Species characteristics from USDA PLANTS (public domain) + TRY (CC BY) — general guidance, not a guarantee for your exact site. Deer "browsing" is documented palatability, not a deer-proof claim.
How we know this (1) Methods & honest limits
Flower colour Derived

McKenzie et al. assigned each species a flower colour with a GPT-4V vision model over iNaturalist photos. We use the confident tier plus a separately-labelled lower-confidence top-up (mostly inconspicuous green/brown flowers), and render it as a small tint — never as an asserted fact, and kept out of the written synopsis.

Honest limits: AI image inference (~87% expert agreement on the confident tier); a decorative, confidence-tiered indicator, not a measured trait.

McKenzie, P., Berardi, A.E., Hopkins, R. (2025). flower_color_phenology (MIT).
Derived values are computed from open data by a published method — labelled, cited, and never shown as a direct observation. Full methodology →
Sources for this entry (10) Open & cited
[01] Scientific name & family — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[02] Growth habit & duration — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[03] Native status & distribution — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[04] Common name — USDA PLANTS (via GBIF)
[05] Invasive / introduced status — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — native status
[07] Description — Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
[08] Conservation rank — NatureServe Explorer (CC BY)
[09] Cold hardiness (derived) — Derived from U.S. range × USDA PHZM zones
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PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).

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