Flowers

As long as they keep coming, I’ll photograph and post our desert cactus flowers. This is a cholla flower I photographed a couple of days ago. Click on the image to enlarge.

Snippet from eNature.com:

Opuntia acanthocarpa – buckhorn cholla

The main trunk of this tree-like cactus is short and erect; branching open and low to ground. Branches are cylindrical; the joints light green.

Habit: native perennial shrub; succulent stems, in segments 4-20 in (10-50 cm) tall by 0.75-1.25 in (2-3 cm) diameter; new growth is gray-green to purple-green; old growth has rough, scaly, brownish black bark.

Flower: delicate, lemon yellow to copper to red to pink, 2-3 in (5-7.5 cm) wide.

In the springtime when all the cacti bloom, there is a wonderful sequence that we have become accustomed to. First, the beavertail cactus blossoms appear, followed shortly by the hedgehog cacti. As those begin to fade away, they are replaced by cholla and then prickly pear flowers.

The photo at the right is of a cactus a few steps west of our yard along the roadway that leads to our neighbor’s house up the hill. This cactus is more mature than those in our yard which do not seem to be developing flower buds this spring, except for one lawyer’s tongue variety of prickly pear near the west side of the property close to the fence.

I will continue post photos of cactus flowers as long as they bloom in the spring, summer and fall. The giant saguaro flowers are going to open in a few weeks and we are really looking forward to that.

Not exactly Australia, but out back of our RV drive on the upper part of our lot. We have lots of cholla and a couple of hedgehog cacti up in the back that we could never see unless we hike up there. Today, I went up to look at the flowers that opened up there and to get pictures of them to enjoy from down below.

On the left is one of the light pink flowers blooming on a hard-to-get-to hedgehog cactus embedded between two palo verde trees and partially obscured by some other brush. At the right is one of many open flowers on the cholla cacti up there. Click on either image to view full-sized.