The saguaro has two seasons, and most guidebooks only cover the first one. In spring it puts out white flowers, the state flower, and people drive to the Preserve to photograph them. In early summer those flowers become red fruit, and for the O’odham peoples of southern Arizona, including Scottsdale’s neighbors in the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, the ripening fruit marks the start of a new year. This note covers both, in order, and is honest about what we could and could not pin down.
The bloom
What happens. Buds form in clusters at the tips of the arms and the top of the trunk. Each flower opens at night and closes the next afternoon, so a single blossom lasts about a day. A plant opens a few at a time over several weeks rather than all at once.
When. The first flowers usually open in late April. Published sources most often put the peak in the second to fourth weeks of May, with stragglers into June. Those sources are mostly written from Tucson, and our own desert plants field guide has the Scottsdale bloom carrying “into the first half of May.” Both can be true: the bloom is spread out, and the Phoenix side may run ahead of Tucson. We could not find a local, year-by-year record of Scottsdale bloom dates, so treat any single “peak week” with suspicion, including ours.
How to see it. Go early. The flowers opened overnight and are still open in the morning, the light is low enough to see white against green, and it is the only comfortable hiking hour in late May anyway. The blooms are at the top of a plant that can stand forty feet. Brown’s Ranch in the northern Preserve has the densest saguaro stands in the city and gentle trails to walk among them. A pair of binoculars and a 6 a.m. start do more than any lens.
Who comes to the flowers. Bats, birds and bees all feed at saguaro blossoms. The textbook night pollinator is the lesser long-nosed bat, but whether those bats reach the Scottsdale area in real numbers is a question we could not settle from published sources. White-winged doves and bees are the daytime visitors you will actually see. If you know the answer, the Desert Botanical Garden and Arizona Game and Fish are the places that would.
The fruit
By the time summer starts the flowers have become fruit: green at first, then red and ripe, usually by mid-June. Ripe fruit splits open at the top and shows red pulp packed with tiny black seeds. Birds and other animals get to it fast; the Salt River Community’s newspaper, O’odham Action News, points out that fruit already split open has usually been found by birds, and that the fruit gives desert animals water and food at the hottest time of the year. The window is short. One Tohono O’odham harvester told the paper he went out five times in about two and a half weeks one summer, usually between 5 and 10 a.m.
The O’odham new year
In O’odham the saguaro is hasan and its fruit is baidaj (also written bahidaj). O’odham Action News, published by the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, describes June as the O’odham New Year and as the time of hasan baidaj masad, the ripening of the saguaro fruit. It says the harvest is celebrated by all four sister tribes: the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, the Gila River Indian Community, the Tohono O’odham Nation and the Ak-Chin Indian Community, and that their ancestors have harvested baidaj for thousands of years. A 2020 story in the same paper describes summer as the beginning of the new year for the O’odham and the Piipaash both, a season of harvest and of the rain that follows.
The Associated Press reported in July 2025 that the harvest is going through a revival on the Tohono O’odham Nation, west of Tucson. Closer to home, the Huhugam Ki Museum on the Salt River reservation, fifteen minutes from Old Town, is the Community’s own museum and the right place to ask what, if anything, is open to the public in a given summer.
How the harvest works, as the harvesters describe it
Everything in this section comes from the Community’s own reporting, and we have kept to what it chose to publish.
- The pole. Harvesters knock the fruit down with a long pole called a kui:pud (also written kuipad or kuiput), made from the ribs of old saguaros, usually ones that have already fallen and dried. A short crosspiece at the top, fixed with wire, gives it a grip on the fruit. Salt River Community member Ron Carlos described tying the ribs together with baling wire.
- The picking. Look for red fruit. One person knocks it down; another opens it with a knife and scrapes the pulp and seeds, the juñ, into a bucket. The empty pods are left on the ground, face up, to bring the rain.
- The cooking. Back at camp the pulp is cooked and strained into jam and a syrup called sitol, poured on mesquite-flour pancakes or used as a glaze. The most important product, the paper says, is na:we, a saguaro wine made by a technique passed down for generations and used in ceremonies to pray for good rain. We will leave the ceremonies there.
- The gathering. In 2019 O’odham Action News covered a two-day harvest camp in Gila River District 1, Blackwater. People with trucks hauled the others out to the stands, others packed coolers to share, volunteer cooks fed the harvesters, and everyone went home with small jars of jam and syrup. For many it was their first harvest.
The paper’s 2020 story ends with Gila River Indian Community member Antonio “Gohk” Davis on why he goes out. The saguaros, he said, are hundreds of years old: “They’re our elders; they are living beings.” His instruction to harvesters was to pick the fruit, leave the pod, give thanks, and share with elders who can no longer get out to the stands.
The rules for the rest of us
The plant is protected. Arizona’s native plant law covers saguaros, and moving one taller than four feet from where it grew takes a state permit, tag and seal. Taking one is a crime, not a gray area.
The fruit is a different legal question. The same law defines a protected native plant as the plant or any part of it “except, unless otherwise specifically included, its seeds or fruit.” So state plant law, by itself, is not what stops someone from picking saguaro fruit. The rules of whoever manages the land do.
In the Preserve, ask first. The McDowell Sonoran Preserve is governed by Chapter 21 of the Scottsdale Revised Code, and the city’s Preserve page links its rules and regulations to section 21-12. We could not load the text of that section to quote it, so we will not tell you what it says. Before you take anything from the Preserve, email preserve@ScottsdaleAZ.gov and get an answer in writing. Our default is to take nothing.
On tribal land, it is not yours to harvest. The Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community and the Tohono O’odham Nation are sovereign, and the saguaros on their land are part of their tradition, not a public amenity.
Leave the ribs. Harvesters make their poles from saguaros that have already fallen. Nobody should be cutting into a standing one for anything.
Our view is that saguaro fruit is not a tourist activity. The harvest is a living practice of the peoples whose land this was, and the respectful way to take part is to learn about it from them, buy from them when they sell, and leave the fruit on your neighborhood’s saguaros to the doves.
The saguaro year, in short
- Spring: buds form on the crowns.
- Late April into June: the bloom, night-opening flowers that last about a day each, with the peak most often cited in May. See the May guide.
- Mid-June: fruit ripens and splits. The O’odham New Year. See the June guide, and our note on heat milestones for why harvesters work at dawn.
- July: the monsoon arrives and the fruit season ends. In the harvesters’ telling, the rain is the point.