What it means
The saguaro is the cactus. Not a cactus: the one on the license plate, the one in every Western shot in a desert that often did not have any, the pleated green column with arms that means Arizona to the rest of the world and means home to people here. Carnegiea gigantea grows wild only in the Sonoran Desert, almost all of it in southern Arizona and Sonora with a sliver in California, and Scottsdale’s foothills and the flats north of Dynamite Boulevard are among the thickest stands anywhere. The desert plants field guide calls it “the whole brand,” and that is not an exaggeration.
The first thing locals teach is the pronunciation: suh-WAR-oh, the g silent, because the word came through Spanish from the O’odham name ha:san. The second is patience. A saguaro the height of a person is older than the person. One with an arm is older than the state. The third is the law: tagged saguaros on a construction site are not decoration, they are permits, and the man who cuts one down for firewood is committing a felony.
Where you’ll meet it
The densest saguaro forest in the city is on the flat trails out of Brown’s Ranch; the slopes of the whole Preserve are dotted with them. Labeled specimens stand at the Xeriscape Garden, the fruit harvest is explained at the Huhugam Ki Museum, and the bloom runs from late April through June.
Where the word came from
Saguaro is an O’odham word that passed through Spanish. The Akimel and Tohono O’odham call the plant ha:san, and Spanish speakers in Sonora rendered it sahuaro, a spelling still seen on old Arizona signs and in the name of more than one subdivision. English kept the Spanish pronunciation and respelled it with a g, which is why visitors say “sa-GWAR-oh” and locals wince. The scientific name is a tribute of a different kind: Carnegiea honors Andrew Carnegie, whose institution funded the Desert Laboratory in Tucson, and the species was placed in its own genus in 1908.
The plant’s cultural weight is older than any of those names. For the Tohono O’odham the saguaro fruit harvest in June is the start of the year: families knock the ripe red fruit down with long poles made of saguaro ribs, cook the pulp into syrup and jam, and ferment some into a wine drunk at the ceremony that calls the summer rains. The Hohokam used the ribs for building and the fruit for food a thousand years earlier, and the exhibits at the Community’s museum carry that story forward.
The modern meaning, the saguaro as the emblem of Arizona, was made official in 1931, when the legislature named the saguaro blossom the state flower. The waxy white flowers, three inches across with yellow centers, open after sunset on the crown of the trunk and arms from late April into June, are pollinated by bats overnight and by bees and white-winged doves in the morning, and close by midafternoon. A big plant may set a couple hundred buds and open only a few each night, which is why the bloom lasts for weeks and why you have to be up early to see it well.
What it is not
Not a cardón, its larger Mexican cousin, which does not grow in Arizona. Not an organ pipe, which branches from the ground. And not old because it is tall: a fat, armless 15-footer is about a century old, and the crested or “cristate” fan-topped saguaros people drive to see are a rare growth anomaly, not a species.
The fine print
The growth numbers are the ones people get wrong. A saguaro seedling at two years is about a quarter inch tall. Reaching three feet takes 20 to 50 years depending on rain; by 95 to 100 years a plant stands 15 or 16 feet and may put out its first arm, though some never do; by about 200 years it has reached full height and is near the end. Forty feet is a very large saguaro; the record holder in Maricopa County stood 78 feet before it toppled in 1986. Full of water after a storm the trunk weighs 3,200 to 4,800 pounds, held up by a ring of woody ribs and anchored by a root system that is wide rather than deep: a taproot only about three feet long, with radial roots within a foot of the surface spreading as far out as the plant is tall. That is why a soaked saguaro falls in a windstorm, and why a trench for a water line can kill one.
Almost every saguaro begins under a nurse tree, a palo verde, ironwood or mesquite, where a bird dropped the seed and the shade kept the seedling alive; Gila woodpeckers and gilded flickers later cut the nest holes that elf owls and finches inherit, and Harris’s hawks build in the arms. Fruit ripens in June with as many as 4,000 seeds apiece.
The law exists because of theft. Cactus rustling, digging saguaros for the landscape trade, was common enough by the 1920s that Arizona wrote native plant laws in response, and the current statute makes it a class 4 felony to remove or damage a saguaro without a permit and tags from the Department of Agriculture, with a maximum sentence of three years and nine months. Legal salvage before development is a licensed business. The newer threats are slower: bacterial necrosis, buffelgrass and brome carrying fire into a plant that never evolved for it, and the long heat waves of recent summers that have killed saguaros outright in the city’s own landscapes.