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which_chickI went to Arizona to see the cactus. And cactus were seen, not just at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix but also at the Saguaro National Park(s), the West and the East. We saw A LOT of cactus. So many.
First and foremost, Tucson is saguaro cactus territory. Throw a rock and you'll hit one, damn near. Certainly if you leave the sprawling endless suburbia that constitutes the Greater Tucson Metro Area, you will have absolutely no trouble looking at saguaros.
Side note: We (east coasters) had a great deal of difficulty determining when cities ended and new cities began in Arizona. We also couldn't really identify a "downtown" in any of the burgs we visited. Phoenix/Scottsdale/Tempe/Mesa just kind of blurred together into one sprawl. Tucson had the same problem only slightly smaller. Maybe it's a western thing? Or a post-cars development thing?
Also, WTF with the Waymos, Phoenix? Robo cars are creepy.
Back to cactus.
Saguaro cactus (Carnegiea gigantea) are large cactus that frequently have arms. They're really quite big. Seriously, they are big. Here is a picture of a random average saguaro, with friend Lala for scale. She's a short-ish human, about 5'3".
Inside, they are supported by kinda-woody ribs. Here's a picture of a dead one, so that you can kind of see how that works:
Baby saguaro do not grow out in the open, as a rule. They generally start off under the shelter of one of the shrubby tree things that they coexist with. (This is true of many of the cactus that grow there, not just saguaro. Most of them start off under shelter of a palo verde or a mesquite or something.) Here's a picture of a young saguaro growing up through a palo verde tree:
Some saguaro have the stereotypical 2 arms, but some have a lot more arms. Some have no arms and never will. For those that do have arms, the park staff said that arms happened at around 75 to 100 years old.
Saguaros with arms:
Saguaro with lots of arms:
Sometimes, saguaros do other... things besides growing arms. This is called cresting:
We don't really know why this happens to some cactus. (Cactus are not a source of research funding.) But some of the crested cactus do seem to be calling for help.
(Yes, I do think I'm funny.)
As you might have already gathered from the informative saguaro photographs above, the scenery DOES NOT look all red and dirt like a Roadrunner cartoon. While it's more red and dirt than the mid-Atlantic forests of Pennsylvania, it's definitely not Roadrunner Cartoon territory either.
Walking along the ground (which we did a lot, at Picacho Peak and also at the Saguaro Nat'l Parks east and west), we saw a ton of shrubby stuff that fell somewhere between "big shrub" and "small tree". From the ground, sight lines are not easy and you could 100% get lost or turned around unless you sighted along a mountain or something in the distance. You cannot see for "miles and miles" at all, that is not what it's like.
In the saguaro area, there aren't trees like I, a Pennsylvania native, understand trees. Nothing grows near the saguaros that would, y'know, go on a hydraulic splitter. Nothing there is making sixteen rounds of 20" diameter firewood. (There are a few trees that get big but they have to be near water. In the saguaro forest parts of Arizona, there are NO big trees.)
The big shrubs or small trees were as follows: mesquite, acacia, ironwood, palo verde. I am not good enough at desert tree identification to give you a guide to these. I only have a quick rule of thumb: If it has green (like really green) bark, it's a palo verde. Here's a pic:
If it has green bark and is covered in yellow flowers, it is also a palo verde. It rained in Phoenix about a week before we got there so the palo verdes in Phoenix were all flowering and shit. Everything was flowering and shit. It was really pretty. Here's a flowering palo verde.
It says in my field guide that the palo verde has "leaves" but we did not see any leaves on any palo verdes. Maybe later in the year during the monsoon there will be leaves on the palo verdes. For us, they were literally green sticks (the name palo verde is spanish for green stick) and that's it. I did look for leaves, but there were not leaves when we were there.
Fwiw, everybody's leaf game was pretty much shit, from an east coast perspective. The leaves were tiny on everything that had leaves. This is likely a cost-savings measure in an area where making leaves is super expensive and uses a lot of water (of which there isn't none but there's very close to none). I'm planning on talking about water in a few days, taking a more people-oriented perspective, but this is not that post. Here are some leaves, against the back of my hand so that the camera can focus on them. Note that I have normal sized hands. These are some wee leaves.
Here's a creosote bush demonstrating small leaves as well:
So. The landscape has saguaro cacti and shrubby trees with small leaves. The landscape also has ferocactus, which I do not know enough about to identify beyond genus. The genus is ferocactus. These are fairly person-sized cacti. They're big, but not saguaro big, with hooked fancy central spines.
Here's an overview of a ferocactus (this one is red, there are also non-red ones):
Here's a detail shot of spines:
It is pretty easy to tell the difference between "young saguaro" and "ferocactus". You're not going to have trouble with that, the spines are very different and the overall shape is also different.
The ferocactus get maybe four feet tall? They're kind of chunkier than saguaros and a lot spinier with big hooked central spines.
Okay. Saguaro, shrubby trees, ferocactus. What else ya got?
Prickly pears (opuntia) -- a couple of different kinds. I am not up to speed on the various sorts of prickly pear, but we saw a couple different ones. Probably. Here are some pictures.
Cholla. We saw a lot of cholla and they kind of make trees? Person sized or a little bigger, cholla are definitely cactus trees. Dead cholla also make the "cactus wood" things that you can buy in gift shops.
This is my favorite sort of cholla (pronounced CHOY-A):
I liked the patterns on this one:
This is a super skinny one that doesn't do the tree thing so well:
And here's one with fruits on it, I'm pretty sure:
The chollas, when dead, look like variations on this theme:
So, if you see "cactus wood" in a shoppe, that's a dead cholla and not a dead prickly pear or a dead saguaro. Good to know.
No matter how nice any of the prickly pears or chollas look, they are not for petting. NOT FOR PETTING. NO TOUCHY. Even the fruits are dangerous.
Ocotillo also inhabit the saguaro desert area. I mentioned them in passing previously, but I'm going to mention them again because they were a surprising hit of the saguaro area for me. They're really fancy and I love them. They can get 20 feet tall and are frequently taller than the "shrubby trees" they share the landscape with.
Here's an ocotillo with leaves on it (this is from closer to Phoenix, where they got rain not that long ago):
Here's one without leaves:
They're just fascinating damn things.
There are also small scale cactus, mammillaria and hedgehog. Here are some pics of these (and note that you have to look underneath mesquites and palo verdes and shit to see these, they are mostly kind of hiding).
Hedgehog cactus:
and flowering:
Mammillaria (these are small):
That's about it for cactus and plants, insofar as we were able to understand them. I'm sure there are more shrubs and more shrubby trees that we failed to understand. It's really tough to get a handle on the landscape in a week.
First and foremost, Tucson is saguaro cactus territory. Throw a rock and you'll hit one, damn near. Certainly if you leave the sprawling endless suburbia that constitutes the Greater Tucson Metro Area, you will have absolutely no trouble looking at saguaros.
Side note: We (east coasters) had a great deal of difficulty determining when cities ended and new cities began in Arizona. We also couldn't really identify a "downtown" in any of the burgs we visited. Phoenix/Scottsdale/Tempe/Mesa just kind of blurred together into one sprawl. Tucson had the same problem only slightly smaller. Maybe it's a western thing? Or a post-cars development thing?
Also, WTF with the Waymos, Phoenix? Robo cars are creepy.
Back to cactus.
Saguaro cactus (Carnegiea gigantea) are large cactus that frequently have arms. They're really quite big. Seriously, they are big. Here is a picture of a random average saguaro, with friend Lala for scale. She's a short-ish human, about 5'3".
Inside, they are supported by kinda-woody ribs. Here's a picture of a dead one, so that you can kind of see how that works:
Baby saguaro do not grow out in the open, as a rule. They generally start off under the shelter of one of the shrubby tree things that they coexist with. (This is true of many of the cactus that grow there, not just saguaro. Most of them start off under shelter of a palo verde or a mesquite or something.) Here's a picture of a young saguaro growing up through a palo verde tree:
Some saguaro have the stereotypical 2 arms, but some have a lot more arms. Some have no arms and never will. For those that do have arms, the park staff said that arms happened at around 75 to 100 years old.
Saguaros with arms:
Saguaro with lots of arms:
Sometimes, saguaros do other... things besides growing arms. This is called cresting:
We don't really know why this happens to some cactus. (Cactus are not a source of research funding.) But some of the crested cactus do seem to be calling for help.
(Yes, I do think I'm funny.)
As you might have already gathered from the informative saguaro photographs above, the scenery DOES NOT look all red and dirt like a Roadrunner cartoon. While it's more red and dirt than the mid-Atlantic forests of Pennsylvania, it's definitely not Roadrunner Cartoon territory either.
Walking along the ground (which we did a lot, at Picacho Peak and also at the Saguaro Nat'l Parks east and west), we saw a ton of shrubby stuff that fell somewhere between "big shrub" and "small tree". From the ground, sight lines are not easy and you could 100% get lost or turned around unless you sighted along a mountain or something in the distance. You cannot see for "miles and miles" at all, that is not what it's like.
In the saguaro area, there aren't trees like I, a Pennsylvania native, understand trees. Nothing grows near the saguaros that would, y'know, go on a hydraulic splitter. Nothing there is making sixteen rounds of 20" diameter firewood. (There are a few trees that get big but they have to be near water. In the saguaro forest parts of Arizona, there are NO big trees.)
The big shrubs or small trees were as follows: mesquite, acacia, ironwood, palo verde. I am not good enough at desert tree identification to give you a guide to these. I only have a quick rule of thumb: If it has green (like really green) bark, it's a palo verde. Here's a pic:
If it has green bark and is covered in yellow flowers, it is also a palo verde. It rained in Phoenix about a week before we got there so the palo verdes in Phoenix were all flowering and shit. Everything was flowering and shit. It was really pretty. Here's a flowering palo verde.
It says in my field guide that the palo verde has "leaves" but we did not see any leaves on any palo verdes. Maybe later in the year during the monsoon there will be leaves on the palo verdes. For us, they were literally green sticks (the name palo verde is spanish for green stick) and that's it. I did look for leaves, but there were not leaves when we were there.
Fwiw, everybody's leaf game was pretty much shit, from an east coast perspective. The leaves were tiny on everything that had leaves. This is likely a cost-savings measure in an area where making leaves is super expensive and uses a lot of water (of which there isn't none but there's very close to none). I'm planning on talking about water in a few days, taking a more people-oriented perspective, but this is not that post. Here are some leaves, against the back of my hand so that the camera can focus on them. Note that I have normal sized hands. These are some wee leaves.
Here's a creosote bush demonstrating small leaves as well:
So. The landscape has saguaro cacti and shrubby trees with small leaves. The landscape also has ferocactus, which I do not know enough about to identify beyond genus. The genus is ferocactus. These are fairly person-sized cacti. They're big, but not saguaro big, with hooked fancy central spines.
Here's an overview of a ferocactus (this one is red, there are also non-red ones):
Here's a detail shot of spines:
It is pretty easy to tell the difference between "young saguaro" and "ferocactus". You're not going to have trouble with that, the spines are very different and the overall shape is also different.
The ferocactus get maybe four feet tall? They're kind of chunkier than saguaros and a lot spinier with big hooked central spines.
Okay. Saguaro, shrubby trees, ferocactus. What else ya got?
Prickly pears (opuntia) -- a couple of different kinds. I am not up to speed on the various sorts of prickly pear, but we saw a couple different ones. Probably. Here are some pictures.
Cholla. We saw a lot of cholla and they kind of make trees? Person sized or a little bigger, cholla are definitely cactus trees. Dead cholla also make the "cactus wood" things that you can buy in gift shops.
This is my favorite sort of cholla (pronounced CHOY-A):
I liked the patterns on this one:
This is a super skinny one that doesn't do the tree thing so well:
And here's one with fruits on it, I'm pretty sure:
The chollas, when dead, look like variations on this theme:
So, if you see "cactus wood" in a shoppe, that's a dead cholla and not a dead prickly pear or a dead saguaro. Good to know.
No matter how nice any of the prickly pears or chollas look, they are not for petting. NOT FOR PETTING. NO TOUCHY. Even the fruits are dangerous.
Ocotillo also inhabit the saguaro desert area. I mentioned them in passing previously, but I'm going to mention them again because they were a surprising hit of the saguaro area for me. They're really fancy and I love them. They can get 20 feet tall and are frequently taller than the "shrubby trees" they share the landscape with.
Here's an ocotillo with leaves on it (this is from closer to Phoenix, where they got rain not that long ago):
Here's one without leaves:
They're just fascinating damn things.
There are also small scale cactus, mammillaria and hedgehog. Here are some pics of these (and note that you have to look underneath mesquites and palo verdes and shit to see these, they are mostly kind of hiding).
Hedgehog cactus:
and flowering:
Mammillaria (these are small):
That's about it for cactus and plants, insofar as we were able to understand them. I'm sure there are more shrubs and more shrubby trees that we failed to understand. It's really tough to get a handle on the landscape in a week.
