Southern Arizona
The Smooth Prickly Pear is a dainty morsel, and how the cattle like to espy it in the few open spaces where it ventures to grow! For this cactus is nearly spineless and clings to the inaccessible cañon slopes where stock cannot prey upon it. In April and May it forms a striking picture on the desert canvas, a great patch of large, showy, lemon-colored blossoms peering forth from the jutting and protecting rocks on all sides of the steep mountain cliffs here in southern Arizona; in July it changes this brilliant coloring with almost kaleidoscopic swiftness to purple and pink splashes of the fine large fruit. Truly the desert is aflame with glory when the prickly pears come forth in bloom! Is it the soul of the Flower trying to find expression in beauty and fragrance, attuned to the soul of the poet and the lover of desert creation, striving to grow in tune with the Universe? Here is a lesson, perchance, that he who runs may read; for those who can pierce the vale of mysteries it is called “in tune with the Infinite.”
Opuntia laevis is three to six feet tall with erect wide-spreading branches ascending from the base. A very few needlelike spicules develop along the stem, crowned by the large striking lemon-colored flowers with orange-red centers, nearly three inches long and as broad, opening in the morning and folding up in late afternoon.
SMOOTH PRICKLY PEAR (Opuntia laevis)
Foothill Prickly Pear (Opuntia Toumeyi)
Southern Arizona and Sonora
Opuntia Toumeyi is a most attractive species and a distinctive type among cacti, covering the foothills of southern Arizona mountains with its waxy green joints and pink spines, sometimes brownish white thorns, and bright golden satiny blooms shading into red and orange at their bases and yellow-green toward the margins, suffused with purple-brown, a lovely harmony of color splashing across the painted canvas of brilliant desert flowers. Appearing in loose golden clumps, one and one-half to three feet tall, with the spicules forming a dense pinkish gray fringe about the upper half of the areolas, this prickly pear roams the rocky, gravelly foothills and mountains here in southern Arizona and in Sonora.
FOOTHILL PRICKLY PEAR (Opuntia Toumeyi)