Excerpt from “Valley 101: A Slightly Skewed Guide to Living in Arizona,” a collection of Clay Thompson’s columns for The Arizona Republic. (Originally published July 15, 2001.)

Here at the Valley 101 Research Center and Windshield Squeegeeing Service, we have amassed a collection of three questions about saguaros, those noble cactuses that symbolize Arizona just as surely as do recall elections.

And we now endeavor to answer these queries with, as always, the help of Patrick Quirk of the Desert Botanical Gardens, who has forgotten more about saguaros then you’ll ever know.

I have lived here almost all my life, but this year was the first time I’ve seen saguaros with red flowers. Usually these are paler blooms. Is there a reason for the red?

Those were not flowers. What you saw was the saguaro fruit that had split open to show its pulpy interior. Saguaro fruit was an important part of the diets of many Native American peoples hereabouts. They even made a kind of wine from it.

For some tribes, the saguaro harvest, followed by the life-giving monsoon rains, marked the beginning of the new year.

Why do saguaros have different numbers of arms?

Why not? Why do trees have different numbers of branches?

However, a healthy and well-watered saguaro will have more arms than a thirsty or ailing saguaro.

When you drive west into California on Interstate 10 the saguaro cactus seem to stop precisely at the border. What’s the cause of this?

As you travel east to west across Arizona, it gets drier, and the saguaros get scarcer. Phoenix’s average annual rainfall is 7.66 inches.

Yuma’s is 3.17.

The monsoon rains that saguaros need to germinate and grow just don’t reach that far west.

And by the time you get to the California line, the saguaros you see tend to be somewhat spindly things confined to washes or other rare wet spots.

One last thing: a tip for the newly arrived. It’s “suh-WAR-o.”

Nothing will cause hot coals of scorn and ridicule to be heaped on your head more quickly than pronouncing it “sa-gar-o.”

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