Spineless Prickly Pear
Opuntia Ellisinia
Beckie Irvin, 2023
Native to Mexico, the Spineless Prickly Pear has been cultivated as a food source since ancient peoples stewarded the lands now known as Central America. In the early-1900s, renowned botanist Luther Burbank began cultivating varieties of “spineless” cacti and selling them as cattle fodder with the promise that they would free up agricultural lands for human use.
It wouldn’t take long for humans and cattle to discover that this cactus produced tiny hairlike spines that buried themselves in skin and mouths - rendering it unsuitable cattle fodder and staining Burbank’s reputation for the rest of his career.
This particular cactus is located on the artist’s childhood home in Hico, Texas. It reminds her that there are consequences for those who try to use plants for capital gain.