Prickly Pear Bloom

What is it about cactus flowers? I’ve always been a big fan, because, well, who wouldn’t be? But lately I’ve been beguiled by them. Or, maybe, obsessed.

On the way to Santa Fe with husband and dog, we wandered along the Rio Grande on a side road near the tiny town of Pilar. This is our typical method of travel – “let’s see where that goes,” one of us says, and so we do. The river rolled by at the road’s edge, full and glossy with spring runoff. River runners in blue rubber boats floated by and we soon came to a campground and a bend in the river where more boats were being put in, with all the usual noisy activity.

The road took a sharp turn here and proceeded uphill. Amid the scrub and the cheat grass and rugged boulders of basalt we struck gold. There were Prickly Pears in lavish bloom. I’m sure I caught “Prickly Pear fever” there and then.

Prickly Pears are immediately recognizable, of course, for their green oval (technically ovate) pads armed with white spines and clusters of darker bristles. The pads are stems, not leaves. This is where the plants store water. Prickly Pears and related Cactaceae are “stem succulents,” as opposed to “leaf succulents,” like Stonecrop.

The pads don’t just store water, they also do the job of leaves and take care of photosynthesis, the process by which the plant turns sunlight (plus carbon dioxide and water) into food.  Prickly Pears do have leaves but they’ve been modified by evolution into those “prickly” spines that ward off the casual grazer.

Prickly Pears are members of the Opuntia genus. The genus name derives from the name of a city (Opus) in Ancient Greece. It’s a “large genus,” according to Nelson (1), and the main species she identifies is Opuntia polyacantha, which she also calls “Hunger Cactus.” Polyacantha means “many-spined”.(2)

Nelson says colors are “yellow fading to orange.” Guennel, on the other hand, says it’s red or yellow. (3) Colors, of course, are in the eye of the beholder. His “red” is my magenta.

Prickly Pear yellow, in my experience, is a light, lemony color with a faint hint of green. In New Mexico, the blooms I saw were closer to brass than lemon, an indication of age, I guess, but no less stunning. My best examples of magenta Prickly Pears are from a blistering hot day on Colorado’s Western Slope outside of Grand Junction. See my gallery here.

Prickly Pear blooms are big, up to 3 inches across. There’s something delicious about the liquid fleshiness of the petals and the way they come to a delicate point. But the star of the show just may be the large green structure in the center of the flower. Conditioned as we are to see anything like this as phallic, we can easily miss the feminist statement this plant makes. That structure is the pistil, the female organ of the plant, and all those little yellow structures bowing to it as if to a queen are the stamens, or male organs.

Of course, it takes two to tango and, in the case of Prickly Pears, after flowers and pollination, come fruits, which form oval-shaped cylinders and ripen to a dark pink. The fruits and the pads are edible. But buy your “tunas” (fruits) and Nopales (pads) in the store and watch out for the “glochids,” the clusters of tiny bristles common to the genus. Once they stick in your skin, they’re hard to remove. (4)

Prickly Pears typically bloom in May and June, and in Colorado can be found from the plains to the foothills.

NOTES:

1 Guide to Rocky Mountain Plants by Ruth Ashton Nelson, revised by Roger L. Williams (1992)

2 Rocky Mountain Wildflowers: Peterson Field Guides by John J. Craighead, Frank C. Craighead Jr., Ray J. Davis (1991)

3 Guide to Colorado Wildflowers, Volume 1, by G.K. Guennel (1995)

4 https://www.desertusa.com/cactus/prickly-pear-cactus.html