The presence of a cactus almost always gets one’s attention, especially when they are in flower. They are always a highlight if one is visiting a part of North America where they are a major part of the landscape, such as Arizona. Here are a few that I photographed in Arizona.
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| Pink-flowered Hedgehog |
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| Saguaro |
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| Santa Rita Prickly Pear |
When it is in flower and one sees it here in southwestern Ontario it is definitely something to focus some attention on. There are a couple of places in southwestern Ontario where it is considered to be there naturally: Point Pelee National Park and Fish Point Prov Nature Reserve, the latter being on Pelee Island.
It can be found at various other places in what appears to be good quality natural habitat, but in most cases there are records of it being intentionally planted in those places in the early half of the last century.
It was never recorded at Rondeau Prov Park until quite recently. Since the middle of last century, there have been many accomplished botanists/naturalists present at Rondeau, either on staff, or out looking for plants. Imagine my surprise when in 1996 I discovered several small patches of it in the grassy beach dunes, all in the general vicinity of the current lighthouse!
It was on July 12, 1996 according to my field notes, when I encountered not one, but five very small clumps of cactus pads with some in flower! I wrote out the details of my encounter on a full page of my field notebook describing the way that those five clumps appeared, in their precise location and relative to other shrubs, etc., as well as approximately to each other as spread across the grassy dunes.
These are scans of some of my clumps of that initial encounter.
Clearly this is not the way the species normally grows like, with a single pad emerging from the sand vertically. If it had been there naturally, one or more pads would be laying on the ground, with subsequent pads growing from those lying flat. But these were put in vertically, and at least a year or two had passed since, as additional pads were growing upright, and in some cases, with a flower at the uppermost pad.
This is an area which had been covered fairly well by those many botanist/naturalist folks over the previous decades, and would not have missed cactus!
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| Clump in July, 2014 |
What adds some certainty to the fact they were intentionally planted, is that all of the small clumps were growing the same way, and all were within a couple of metres or so to a small shrub. This would serve as a reference point for whoever planted them, to be able to re-locate them to see how they were progressing. Again, growing like that would not have been natural at all.
Clearly cactus would be expected to do well in these very dry, sandy environments, and they have expanded. Here is what a couple of clumps looked like in 2025, in one case showing the lighthouse in the background. The clumps have expanded into numerous pads spreading out from the original with most lying flat on the ground or on top of other pads.
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| A now larger clump in close proximity to a shrub |
I was on the provincial Lake Erie Sandspit Recovery team in the early 2000s, and one of the things we wanted to determine was what the genetics were of the various populations of cactus in SW ON, so a geneticist from U of Windsor did the testing. The results from the couple of cactus pads of Rondeau that were collected and tested, were determined to be the same as the population at Fish Point PNR, and one member of our team suggested the Rondeau ones were there naturally as they could have come across from water currents over the years. This was utterly ridiculous, as when they were first discovered, all clumps were at least 125 metres from the nearest shoreline, so if they had been washed ashore, why were they only occurring so far inland, especially since the general area had been visited by qualified naturalists for decades?
I have a couple of suspicions as to who planted them, both who were connected to Rondeau in the early ‘90s. One of them had a tendency to plant species that, although they were native to Ontario, were not native to the park. He even encouraged cottage owners to plant colourful species, not native to the park, but native to Ontario. Would he admit it? I don’t know as I never asked, and he has not been a resident of Ontario for many years as far as I know. The other person had a connection to Fish Point Prov Nature Reserve.
There is more to the overall story, which I plan to elaborate on in the next blog post.
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| July '26 |
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