Opuntia monacantha (Common Pricklypear)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Opuntia monacantha, photographed by Adithyan A Saj — fig. a Adithyan A Saj, CC0 1.0 / 2022-05-31 / obs. 202133757

Opuntia monacantha, photographed by Greg Tasney — fig. b Greg Tasney, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 198600790

Opuntia monacantha, photographed by Jacy Chen — fig. c Jacy Chen, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 200215601

Opuntia monacantha, photographed by Dagmar Gleiss — fig. d Dagmar Gleiss, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 195038289

Opuntia monacantha, photographed by Shaun Swanepoel — fig. f Shaun Swanepoel, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 192480877

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 5 botanical countries

Native distribution of Opuntia monacantha, 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.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Brazil Northeast	BZE	SOUTHERN AMERICA
Brazil South	BZS
Brazil Southeast	BZL
Paraguay	PAR
Uruguay	URU

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 392 in flower of 744 examined

54%

56%

39%

44%

63%

60%

40%

22%

32%

52%

76%

66%

Proportion of examined Opuntia monacantha in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	35	65	54%	42% to 65%
Feb	30	54	56%	42% to 68%
Mar	24	61	39%	28% to 52%
Apr	41	94	44%	34% to 54%
May	51	81	63%	52% to 73%
Jun	39	65	60%	48% to 71%
Jul	17	43	40%	26% to 54%
Aug	8	36	22%	12% to 38%
Sep	13	41	32%	20% to 47%
Oct	33	63	52%	40% to 64%
Nov	60	79	76%	65% to 84%
Dec	41	62	66%	54% to 77%

Peak flowering in Nov. Each bar is the share of Opuntia monacantha 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. 392 of 744 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 2,007 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	4.9 °C	10.6 °C	18.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	21.1 °C	26.2 °C	30.2 °C
Annual rainfall	539 mm	1,032 mm	2,111 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	24 mm	121 mm	309 mm

It is barely found anywhere that freezes. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 2,007 research-grade observations of Opuntia monacantha 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 13 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.

Cactus monacanthos Willd.
Cactus opuntia var. parvifolius Risso
Cactus urumbeba Vell.
Opuntia deflexa Lem.
Opuntia gracilior Lem.
Opuntia lemaireana Console ex Bois
Opuntia monacantha var. deflexa Salm-Dyck
Opuntia monacantha var. gracilior Lem.
Opuntia monacantha var. variegata Anon.
Opuntia roxburghiana Voigt
Opuntia urumbea (Vell.) Steud.
Opuntia urumbeba (Vell.) Steud.
Opuntia vulgaris var. lemaireana (Console ex Bois) Backeb.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
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.