Texas Prickly Pear is a cactus native to Hays County. Despite their hardiness, some of these desert-growing plants are succumbing to the drought. (Photo by Neelybat Chestnut)
by JONATHAN YORK
Friday evening a broken water main sent little rivers down the side of Live Oak Street in Kyle. The water pooled in lawns, ran down driveways, and made the middle of the street a noisy puddle.
The neighbors stared. As the city trucks pulled up flashing red and blue lights, and the workers hurried to seal the line, you could see a little amazement breaking on all the tense faces.
It was almost as if it had rained.
People are getting used to withered lawns and dead trees, and until Tuesday’s thunderstorm the little river on Live Oak Street seemed like the last time we’d see puddles. But the drought is killing another of our silent neighbors too; the one best-equipped to live through it.
“It’s been kind of a unique year, not just for cactus but for all plants in general,” said Richard Parrish with the Hays County office of the Texas AgriLife Extension Service. “We’ve seen a lot of cactus actually drying up and dying because of the lack of water.”
Kyle’s native cactus grows wild in those lots along Burleson Street where there’s nothing but styrofoam cups, dry bones and grass that’s been burned almost white by the sun. Naturalists call it by the gorgeous name Opuntia engelmannii var. lindheimeri. The rest of us might know it as the Texas Prickly Pear, a name that makes good sense if you kneel beside it (avoiding the thorns) and observe its knobby purple fruit.
Deer, squirrels, birds and raccoons eat that fruit – which is sometimes called a tuna – but this year’s yield has been meager.
“It seems that it’s focused more in maintaining its own life than in propagating itself,” Parrish said. Many people think, “If I’m lost in the desert, I’ll just find me a cactus and get some water,” he said, “and cactus is a great source of water. But cactus needs water as well.”
Some cactus plants are thornless. Their pads have a bar-soap consistency and can be about the size of an extended hand. They blend into the landscape almost enough to be invisible to the line of cars going down the road all day — but even so, their blue-green tone stands out just a bit from the colors around them. Nothing else is that kind of green.
A few plants in these fields, though, are turning brown. It’s usually not a whole plant or a whole patch, but here and there a couple pads are drying out and falling off, as if a motionless army were losing limbs in battle.
“I’ve seen that quite a bit on cactus this year,” Parrish said.
Chris Winslow runs a nursery just across the Travis County line, where he stocks a greenhouse full of the succulents that are much in demand as Austin lawns get drier. (He also writes a column for this newspaper.)
Of the prickly pear, he said: “The native species holds its own pretty well. There are some other fancy ones that have moved their way in, like beaver tail. Some of them have shown themselves not to be that winter-hardy.”
Last winter’s chill killed succulents off right and left. Now a colder winter and an extensive drought may be giving his customers new reasons to seek native plants.
“With the water resources we have, we are definitely going to see yards get a little different around here,” Winslow said.
The good thing about the cactus on Burleson is that no one tends or pays for it. Each three-, four- or five-foot tall plant just aims its yellow spines out in the sun, and at the proper angle you can see that they’re translucent.
To ranchers and hay farmers they can be a pain. “It is something that is more prevalent in fields that have been overgrazed,” said Meg Inglis of the Native Plant Society of Texas. “It’s one of these plants that just sort of moves in and takes over an overgrazed area, like a ranch.”
But many Texans find them both lovely and useful, arranging cactus flowerbeds, removing the thorns and cooking the pads (in Spanish, “nopales”) or picking the fruit to mix a smooth, tasty jelly.
“There are the people who do think that cactus is very pretty to look at,” Parrish said. “They like to see the yellow and the pink flowers ... the thorned cactus as well as the thornless cactus. I myself, I think personally that they produce a beautiful flower.”
