Could This Be,

the tallest urban cactus in the world?

 all photographs by Japanese Twitter user =Yang= (@0okome0), last Wednesday, the Japanese Twitter user posted a bunch of intriguing photos of a building he had spotted in Takinogawa, Tokyo Metropolitan Area, as he approached the strange sight, he realized that it was actually a thick cactus stretching from the bottom all the way to the roof of the three-storey residential building, He snapped some pics and posted them on Twitter, where they quickly went viral,

 a  closer look at the incredibly-tall cactus plant reveals that someone has been taking care of it, fastening it to the side of the building with metal rings, so that it doesn’t bend under its own weight, and removing all of its thorns, to prevent accidental injuries, while the cactus seems to have grown straight along the building wall, it became deformed when it reached the top, with some Twitter users pointing out that it kind of looks like a human trying to jump over the safety fence on top of the building, unfortunately, no one has any information about the plant – like how old it is, or even what kind of cactus it is – or its owner, but people have been speculating that it might just be the world’s tallest cactus, as it happens the Guinness World Record for ‘world’s tallest cactus’ belongs to a Mexican Giant Cardon cactus which measured 19.2 meters in 1995, that’s going to be hard to beat, but the Takinogawa cactus is still growing, 

as an aside I thought that this one might be the Saguaro Cactus, (Carnegiea gigantea), the saguaro cactus is the largest cactus in the United States, and will normally reach heights of 40 feet tall, the tallest saguaro cactus ever measured towered over 78 feet into the air, but on reflection I must be wrong, purely by looking at the growth rate, it can take 10 years for a saguaro cactus to reach 1 inch in height, by 70 years of age, a saguaro cactus can reach 6 and a half feet tall, and will finally start to produce their first flowers, by 95-100 years in age, a saguaro cactus can reach a height of 15-16 feet, so it can not be a Saguaro cactus, but what ever it is, it is big!