Basin wiki · Plants
Beavertail cactus
Opuntia basilaris · beavertail pricklypear
Low blue-gray pads and magenta spring flowers. The pads look spineless until the glochids find you.
Where you'll see it
Beavertail is widespread on gravelly slopes, wash edges, and rocky benches through the basin and the park. Calflora records it in creosote scrub and Joshua tree woodland. A wet winter brings the pink-magenta flowers that stop traffic on Park Boulevard and on the Morongo grade. Dry years the plant is still there; it just does not put on the show.
How to tell it
Pads are flat, thick, and often blue-green or gray, without the long spines of a prickly pear people expect. The trap is the glochids: tiny barbed bristles in the areoles. They detach by the dozen and work deeper if you rub them. Flowers are satiny and usually magenta, sometimes paler. The plant stays low, a cluster of pads rather than a shrub you walk under.
Glochids
Admire from a step back. If you brush a pad, skip the fingers-and-water method, which spreads the bristles. Tape, a thin layer of white glue peeled off, or tweezers under a bright light are the usual home remedies; a bad case in a knee or a dog’s lip is a clinic visit. Shoes and pant cuffs carry them into the house. Garden-center beavertails are the same plant in a pot and the same mistake.
In a yard
A beavertail already on the lot is worth leaving. It handles full sun and almost no summer water once established, and the flowers feed native bees in spring. Moving wild pads into a new subdivision bed is a good way to spread glochids and a bad way to treat native cactus. Park plants stay in the park.