Hey! Who’s really important here?

When all those flowers are gone, we’ll still be here. (If you’ve seen “The Three Amigos”, your mind is saying “I’m still here, El Guaopo.” 🙂 But I digress.

Ask what sort of plants grow in the desert and “cactus” will likely be the first answer for almost everyone. Cacti have been designed specifically to thrive in an environment where water is at a premium, heat at a maximum. The saguaro is the iconic cactus despite only growing in the Sonoran desert between sea level and 4,000 ft. Above that they’ll only grow on the southern, sunny side of a slope.

How best to capture and use water when there is so little? A long taproot and a plethora of wide-spreading roots just belowe the surface enable the saguaro to tap (pun intended) water well below the surface as well as whatever water just begins to soak into the ground. A thick waxy coating and hard spines prevent water loss and as the cactus accumulates water, the outside expands to store more and more water. That means a full cactus might weigh as much as a ton.

Some saguaro have many arms, others have none. Saguaro serve as favorite apartment buildings for birds and in spring and early summer are topped with beautiful white flowers. It’s not easy to get photos of them, though, because flowers are so high above a standing person. But don’t mess with a saguaro! Besides it being a class-four felony to cut one down, at least one saguaro has been know to take its own revenge:

In 1982, a man was killed after damaging a saguaro. David Grundman was shooting and poking at a saguaro cactus in an effort to make it fall. An arm of the cactus, weighing 230 kg (500 lb), fell onto him, crushing him and his car. The trunk of the cactus then also fell on him. The Austin Lounge Lizards wrote the song “Saguaro” about this death. ~Wikipedia

Remember that teddy bear cholla are NOT cuddly, despite their appealing name. The silvery spines are actually leaves but rather deadly ones Don’t cuddle with this teddy!

The prickly pear (focus on the prickly part) have long spines and fruit that is eaten in many countries and cultures. We had prickly pear lemonade once, the fruit giving it a beautiful deep pink color.