This photo illustrates the beauty of this plant in the landscape. It fits in well with a nicely planted cactus garden, and also with a standard garden setting, though one must be careful not to water it too much!
This is a photo of the same plants taken four years after the one above it.These plants do put out some
impressive growth.
Here we see a close up of the Opuntia Robusta 'spineless'
Like our other plants, though we call them spineless they still have a
number of the tiney glochids here and there on some of the aeroles.
Here we see a very unusual thing, it is a fly that somehow got hooked onto
one of the tiny glochids. I have no idea how it got there, nor how long
it had been there.
The look of this plant, with it's gloucous coating
is very impressive. The leaves can grow over one foot wide, and have the
flat look of a large platter. A very impressive plant when grown in a space
with some room.
This plant can tend to rot more easily than the rest
of our plants. The cuttings must be planted into the well draining soil,
and watered just once. After that one must be so very careful to not keep
the soil moist while it is rooting, it will do much better with less water
than optimum, than with any too much water at all.
And here is a good example of the 'spineless' robusta fruits. Note it is being held in the bare hand of a field worker, yet notice how gingerly and carefully he is holding it. This is because these fruits do carry a good number of the small glochids which while not as large and dangerous as the spines, are troublesome nettles. This fruit should be handled with gloves or tongs by all but the experienced cactus worker.
We recommend you not plant this variety alongside a driveway. The spines are large and wicked, and unforgiving to the flesh. The plants have much the same growing characteristics as the spineless robusta, but they are of course very, VERY, SPINY!
This photo shows the large purple fruit of the robusta plants. These are from the spiny robustas, and you can see here the large spines the spiny robusta fruits carry. The 'spineless' robusta fruits do have a few spines and are not totally spineless, but they are much less spiny than these monsters.