Opuntia cochenillifera, according to the
USDA site, lives only in Florida and Hawaii, but I have one that's growing like an absolute beast here in California. (I'm hesitant to prune it. It's "spineless," but that only means its prickles are invisible. You can't even
feel them right away. Pretty soon, you have a hundred of them in each finger plus on every part of your body you've touched, and now they're irritating the skin like all get-out. They're blond and oh-so fine — sometimes even ungrabbable with a tweezers — but powerfully annoying. But I digress.)
In my
earlier post, I mentioned that its flowers are not like the other Prickly Pears' flowers in my neighborhood, the others being petaled and yellow while mine are not. For comparison, here's a kind of random picture I took a while back of my neighbor's plant. (His is
not "spineless.")
Well, I think the
true flower might actually be that yellow thingy that extends out of all the pink bells-and-whistles, kind of like how Bougainvillea flowers are the little white guys, not the brightly colored bracts that we notice. This is a 2009 picture of my now dearly departed Bougainvillea with two sweet little flowers among all those bracts. Are they called "bracts" on the Prickly Pear, too?
Here's the weird thing that happens post-flower and pre-fruit:
That's what I
really wanted to show you. I'll post what happens next.
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