Flower:

Flowers are showy, 2 to 3 inches across, with 7 or more yellow petals that are sometimes reddish at the base. A green ovary protrudes in the center, surrounded by numerous yellow or red stamens with yellow tips. There may be 1 to several flowers around the tip end of a pad.

Leaves and stems:

With cacti, the spines are modified leaves and the fleshy pad segments are modified stems. Spines are up to 2½ inches long and typically straight, clustered in groups of 1 to 6, growing from numerous small projections (areoles) on the surface of the pad. The spines are not hooked but the areoles have tiny barbs (glochids) at the base of the spine cluster that easily detach and can be difficult to see, let alone remove once embedded in skin. The pads are a dull dark green to blue green, generally a flattened round, oval or egg shape, 2 to 5 inches long and 2 to 4 inches wide with a waxy surface. The segments do not easily detach from each other. Plants can form a mat up to 5 feet across.

Notes:

There are 3 species of prickly pear cactus native to Minnesota, and about a dozen in North America. The flowers of the 3 natives are more or less the same. Distinguishing features are mostly the size and shape of the pads and number of spines. Opuntia fragilis has much smaller pads that easily detach and up to 8 spines per areole. O. humifusa has less densely crowded areoles with 0 to 2 spines each. Plains Prickly Pear is way overlooked as an interesting garden species. It will thrive in any hot summer location, from clay to sandy soils, as long as site is hot and well drained. New starts are easy—just cut off and root a year old pad, any time of year. It also germinates readily from seed though maturation period is numbers of years. I've used long handled forceps and leather gloves to get at weeds growing between the pads—dangerous work, but worth it!