Cacti "hunkered down" (dormant) for the winter months.

PB

With the native Beavertail Prickly Pear (Opuntia basilaris) in bloom this time of the year in the Sonoran Desert, recently we headed out to a spot where in the past there were literally fields of them. How sad it was to see that blackmarket landscapers had illegally dug up hunderds of plants, so man...

This past winter while hiking in a remote area near my home town, we came across a hill with a rather large population of a "clumped cactus." Various discussions theorized as to what it was. I leaned toward it being a claret cup hedgehog, but was troubled by its unusually large size and th...

As many discussions about the ID of, in particular, Opuntia and its variants point out, it is very important to interject the geographic locations of a native plant when trying to put a scientific name on it. As this photo was taken in Agua Fria National Monument in Arizona, it is most likely that t...

Such a difficult choice to make for me as I am an Opuntia collector. Alast, I have chosen from one of my rarest (in the sense that it is difficult to find). Here is my Tacinga palmadora in bloom. This species hails from Brazil, but I found it at a local funeral home (the original plant has since bee...