Opuntia mesacanthaRaf.

WFO wfo-0001289803 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Opuntia mesacantha, photographed by Leila Dasher
fig. a Leila Dasher, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-08-02 / obs. 148297874
Opuntia mesacantha, photographed by vankat
fig. b vankat, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 107839717
Opuntia mesacantha, photographed by yajapin
fig. c yajapin, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 90374749
Opuntia mesacantha, photographed by Eric Knight
fig. d Eric Knight, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 78688029
Opuntia mesacantha, photographed by Claire Herzog
fig. e Claire Herzog, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 77074604
Opuntia mesacantha, photographed by M Fonda
fig. f M Fonda, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 74222403
Opuntia mesacantha, photographed by Carol Ann McCormick
fig. g Carol Ann McCormick, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 70711876
Opuntia mesacantha, photographed by Kaden Slone
fig. h Kaden Slone, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 58402831

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Native range 12 botanical countries

Regions where Opuntia mesacantha is native: Alabama, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia AlabamaFloridaGeorgiaLouisianaMarylandMississippiNew JerseyNorth CarolinaSouth CarolinaTennesseeVirginia Delaware
Native distribution of Opuntia mesacantha, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows. Regions too small to draw at this scale are marked with a dot.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Alabama ALA NORTHERN AMERICA
Delaware DEL
Florida FLA
Georgia GEO
Louisiana LOU
Maryland MRY
Mississippi MSI
New Jersey NWJ
North Carolina NCA
South Carolina SCA
Tennessee TEN
Virginia VRG

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 44 in flower of 173 examined

Peak flowering in May. Each bar is the share of Opuntia mesacantha observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 44 of 173 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Where it actually grows measured, from 1,064 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -1.6 °C 2.3 °C 10.8 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 27.2 °C 31.0 °C 32.4 °C
Annual rainfall 1,053 mm 1,273 mm 1,612 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 184 mm 272 mm 337 mm

It is found where winters bring light frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,064 research-grade observations of Opuntia mesacantha that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 6 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

  • Opuntia eburnispina Small
  • Opuntia impedata Small ex Britton & Rose
  • Opuntia lata Small
  • Opuntia macrarthra Gibbes
  • Opuntia pollardii Britton & Rose
  • Opuntia youngii C.Z.Nelson

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
  3. Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.