Mirabilis multiflora aka Colorado Four o’Clock is a beautiful native plant that blooms from April to the first freeze. This plant survives on the water and food that is available to it and produces thick stemmed stands of plants 36 to 40 inches tall. It is drought tolerant which makes it ideal for the hot summers in my part of Texas.

This species can become a problem in the home garden because it  spreads by underground rhizomes. The rhizomes of this species are found between 2 and 6 inches deep in the soil. Periodic rhizome trimming with a shovel can train these guys to where you want them. Some folks put them inside pots buried in the ground to keep them contained. We have a flowerbed where the roses are surrounded by these and they can grow tall enough to dominate them.  We just prune the rascals and they grow back.

In the winter we cut them to the ground and watch them pop back in the spring. I recently dug up the rhizomes near the roses; unfortunately, I missed some and we had another crop of Four o’Clocks. I was satisfied with the reduction in numbers, and I plan to keep them in check this way. If you like pink tubular flowers throughout the spring, summer, and fall, these guys will make you happy. They thrive on irregular watering and feeding and they don’t seem to need as much as other landscape plants except where their vigorous growth requires trimming.

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The pads produce white to gray, brownish, or reddish spines in clusters of 1 to 10 spines ranging in length from 1-3 inches. In addition, the base of each spine cluster is ringed by numerous hair spines or glochids. It is bad enough to get the longer spines stuck into your feet or hands but the hair spines are an additional insult that requires much more attention to detail to get them all removed.

Opuntia produce new pads along the edges of previous year’s pads so they appear as a cluster of pads that spread out along the ground from original plant. Prickly pear pads in contact with the grounda will form roots. Like cholla cactus, the pads of the prickly pear can form a new plant if they are removed from the parent plant by animal activity and are left in contact with the ground.

Prickly pear are named for their cylidrical fruit that are covered with hair spines or glochidia. The flowers of Opuntia generally can be seen in yellow, yellow and red, or a dull reddish pink color.

Ripe fruits are generally cherry red in color but they can be pink or pale green.

Some folks collect these and remove the glochidia before making them into jams or jellies. The young pads of Opuntia are also edible and are the nopalito seen in some grocery stores these days. All parts of the pads can have hair spines and care must be taken to remove these before consumption.

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The cactus pictured is Cylindropuntia leptocaulis, the Desert Christmas Cholla. It is one of the most widespread of the cholla cacti. They are found in western Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona and northern Mexico. When taller plants are around this species will grow beneath them and use them as a trellis to support taller growth. The cactus in these photos was growing along and using the support of a barbed wire fence, and it was beneath a tree.

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We have a section in the front yard that has a cedar elm tree surrounded by Tree Cholla cactus, Cylindropuntia imbricata. As you can see the body of the plant is made of cylindrical branches that have no regular arrangement. The cholla here has spread fill the space we grant it in the yard. The elm tree was not planted and came up amidst the cholla from seed eaten and scattered by one of our local birds. All the water last winter, and the wet spring brought this plant into flower in May of 2016.

I exercise care around the cholla because they have spines that like to embed themselves in flesh and hang on. When they do, a piece of the cholla can break off and be carried some distance from the parent plant and if it lands in fertile circumstances, more cholla! This talent of the cholla has to be considered when reducing or removing parts of the plant. Failure to keep pieces from finding new homes means More Cholla!

Our cholla patch occasionally produces the beautiful purple flowers typical of this species. It also is a barbed refuge for our local cottontail. We do not water or feed the cholla and it does what west Texas cacti do, it gets by on what’s available.

I am not sure how the cholla got its name; but on one, long ago field trip, the sound I and others made while having close encounters with the spines of this plant sounded like CHOYAH!!  And these were followed by grunts and ouches as these things were pried from our flesh. This where young folk learn respect for nature, especially cholla.

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