How to grow
This Prickly Pear grows indoors or outside and is not injured by temperatures twenty or twenty-five degrees below freezing. It can be transplanted at any season. If mature plants are transplanted early in spring they blossom the same season. Cuttings do not root readily and sometimes remain in the ground a year without growing. They should be planted early in spring in sandy or gravelly clay loam; the plants should be watered about once a month to insure good growth.
Porcupine Prickly Pear (Opuntia hystricina)
(Named from its long reddish or brownish spines)
How to identify and how it grows
The Porcupine Prickly Pear is formed of stems a foot or so high covered with finely grooved spines, long and slender and needlelike, up to four inches long, white and brownish red. The spicules occur in a crescent-shaped mass of light brown or yellowish colorings. The flowers are two to three inches long and as broad. They are very showy and bright purple or yellowish; they appear in April and May, while the fruit ripens in July and August. The Porcupine Prickly Pear grows at high altitudes and will endure temperatures below zero without injury.
How to grow
A popular beauty in gardens, it grows readily from mature cuttings planted at almost any season. If planted in early spring, they should blossom the same season. The cuttings should be dried off first to give the cut time to heal over, planted in gravelly or loamy soil with about one-half of the cutting covered, and watered once a month during the growing season. The species may be grown also from seed in flats or pots in moist soil with partial shade but with dry air. The plants are not injured by temperatures of twenty-five degrees below zero, and hence with proper soil, drainage, and limited irrigation may be grown out of doors in almost any part of the United States or of the temperate zones.
CHAPTER VI
MINIATURE FORTRESSES ON THE DESERT
Some of the first inhabitants of the plant kingdom to greet the traveler approaching the desert from almost any direction are most unfriendly, fierce, and strongly armored, as if they would resist intrusion into their own special domain. These fierce cacti are small fortresses of the desert. Out there under burning-hot dry winds, where water is mighty scarce, where the soil is pulverized rock or shale or wastes of alkali sand, life at best is but little more than a fight to survive against yearly drought, seasonal storm, and blazing heat; even the bold woodpeckers, the rodents, and the sly sand foxes play their part in this silent drama Nature stages in the struggle for existence. Among the first greeters of the desert are the Cholla members of the great genus Opuntia, the fighters of the strange Fantastic Clan. Their flower colorings are many and variegated, mostly beautiful yellows and orange-yellows, purples, reds and browns, maroons, orange-reds and lavenders; some species possess nearly all colors of the spectrum and are veritable rainbows of tint and hue, with the desert for a dark and picturesque setting. What could be more beautiful than the desert rim with its towering peaks unrolling into low vistas of bajadas, receding into still lower valleys and swales, piled here and there with rocks of volcanic outcroppings, and then the great splashes of Cholla flowers with their brilliant patchwork of colorings stuck at random on their drab, gray, somber, twisted, thornlike, armored trunks? No artist has painted this glorious desert canvas in all the gorgeous tints and hues, the wonderful shadings and tones of the Great Builder’s masterpiece, save One, the Master Mind who conceived and created all.