Field Guide to Medicinal Wild Plants by Bradford Angier

Author:Bradford Angier
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811742801
Publisher: Stackpole Books
Published: 2013-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

PRICKLY PEAR

Opuntia

FAMILY: Cactus (Cactaceae)

COMMON NAMES: Eastern Prickly Pear, Western Prickly Pear, Prickly Pear Cactus, Plains Cactus, Opuntia, Devil’s Tongue, Tuna, Beavertail, Nopal, Slipper Thorn, Indian Fig.

CHARACTERISTICS: Prickly pears are the cacti with the flat-jointed stems. Those members of the same Cactaceae family with round-jointed stems are called chollas and are fibrous and dry. On the other hand, the prickly pear cacti, protecting their bitterish moisture by having spines instead of leaves and by being layered with a thick covering of wax, have long been a source of emergency drinking water for native desert people and for those who followed them. This juice is so mucilaginous that it is still sometimes used in making mortar.

The pale, oval seeds are about 5 millimeters in diameter and have a depressed center and margin. The dramatically lush red and golden flowers that grow on the padlike joints of the prickly pear during the late spring and early fall evolve into the fruit that gives the genus its name. Ranging in size from that of small plums to oranges, the mature colors extend from golden green and dark purple to the red of the big delicious prickly pears of the Opuntia megacantha of the Southwest. The commercially traded Indian fig (O. ficus indica) lacks the small, very painful spines and is thus easily utilized.

The family is much more easily recognized than harvested, which, because of its sharp spines, is best accomplished with substantial leather gloves and a knife.

AREA: Distribution of these cacti has been extended throughout North America because of their popularity as garden and house plants, from which domesticity many have escaped to the wilds. Native only in the Americas, these cacti thrive best in Mexico, where you see the cattle eating them. Within the United States and Canada they grow from California to British Columbia in the West, extending well eastward into the interior. In the East one finds them from New England to Florida.

USES: Native Americans and plainsmen, mountain men, prospectors, trappers, and settlers following in dusty wagon trains, long peeled the stems of the prickly pear, dampened bandages and compresses with their rather acrid, sticky juice, and bound these on abrasions and other wounds to promote healing.

Poultices were also prepared from the mashed pulp and applied to suppurating sores on man and domestic animal alike, being especially useful among horses, mules, and burros for the treatment of saddle sores. Too, the peeled stems were bound over wounds like bandages. The young joints were also secured before the spines had time to grow, roasted or boiled, and used as compresses for arthritis. The carefully despined and peeled lobes were, and in some cases still are, regarded as efficacious for the alleviation of arthritic swelling, redness, heat, and pain. These so-prepared, warmed pads were even applied to the breasts of new mothers to increase the flow of milk.

The split joints, care being taken with the spines, were roasted and applied to help heal ulcers. Roasted over campfire coals, they were bound over the swelling of mumps.

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