Back to St. George

I needed to run into town the other afternoon, so I grabbed my camera. My first stop was St. George.

On this trip I spent some time walking around the grounds. The campus has loads of cacti varieties. But more on those at another post. For this post I am focusing on the magnificent blooming saguaro.

This is the base, which is unusual. If indeed a saguaro doesn't 'grow' it's first arm until around 50-75 years, this trunk was very short for the usual saguaro. I don't think this trunk is more than 24 inches tall before the arms begin. Definitely not typical of the saguaros I have seen in the desert or around town. Correction: the first arms are at about the 4' area, so not as 'short' as I thought, as pointed out by a friend in a photo of her standing next to the saguaro.

The ground was littered with dead blossoms.

The dead flowers look like red pineapples. My research tells me this is the fruit, if pollination occurred while the flower was open. Once it is completely ripe, it will split open revealing juicy red pulp with small black seeds., about 4,000 per pod. The most prolific species of the cacti family..

I thought this was a great shot showing the dying blossom, the flowering blossom, and all the yet to bloom buds, from just starting to almost ready.

Blooming usually takes place between late April & late June over a period of several weeks to a month. The flowers open 2 hours after sunset and remain open until the next afternoon, according to Cactus of Arizona Field Guide.

So amazing to see all the blossoms near the top of the one arm.

 I picked up one dropped blossom to take a good look at the inside. The dying petals look waxy. I don't remember plant science well enough to remember stamen & stigma or to know which is which.

A dense group of yellow stamens forms a circle at the top of the tube; the Saguaro has more stamens per flower than any other desert cactus. A sweet nectar accumulates in the bottom of this tube. The Saguaro can only be fertilized by cross-pollination -- pollen from a different cactus. The sweet nectar, together with the color of the flower, attracts birds, bats and insects, which in acquiring the nectar, pollinate the Saguaro flower.

"Like most cactus, the buds appear on the southeastern exposure of stem tips, and flowers may completely encircle stems in a good year."


Each funnel-shaped flower is 4 to 5" long and 2 1/2-3 1/2 inches wide. The bloom is held by a long tube of pointed green (? these are definitely red) leaves called bracts. For this reason and the trunk size, I am not positive this is a saguaro. But my research isn't helping with its identification. So for now it is a saguaro.