Cactus Office Plants: Opuntia or Prickly Pear Cactus

Recently the interior plant craze has been succulents in small bowl arrangements. Accordingly, cacti are also making a comeback.

Once popular in offices in the late nineties, there’s been a big resurgence in placing cacti as office plants, and we’ve been installing more and more of them.

One of my favorites is Opuntia, or Prickly Pear Cactus.

In the picture shown at the top left, we have the common opuntia that we install in offices–these are grown in Florida and are “spineless”–for ornamental purposes they’re grown without their trademark long spines for both safety and visual appeal. The picture on the bottom left shows a true prickly pear cactus in all it’s spiky glory–big, half inch to inch long thorns that will do a number on you should you make the mistake of falling into one–trust me–I know from hiking in Arizona and accidently falling one one or two.

In general, Cacti make pretty easy office plants to care for–it goes without saying they can tolerate long periods without watering, and are very resistent to most pests that attack other indoor plants with the exception of scale from time to time. What they need, which most people don’t understand, is lots and lots of natural sunlight. The need to be in a window, preferably a south/southwest facing window, so they can get all the sunlight they’ll need to survive indoors. They simply won’t survive under flouescent lights–these types of lights don’t emit enough lumens to support cacti.

Memory Lane: Our First Interior Planter Installation

In looking through some very old photos we had of when the company was just starting out, I came across this picture from 2002.

It’s of the very first planter installation we ever did–meaning a built in planter in an office building in Burlington, MA. I guess I feel kind of nostalgic when I look at this photo; it wasn’t a big job at all, but it felt like it at the time!

It was the same feeling you get anytime you’re doing something for the first time–are all the plants perfectly aligned? Are they seated too tall or too short in the planter? Is the rock groundcover perfectly even–did we use enough? Though I had lots of experience doing interior plants at the now defunct City Gardens in Newton back in the 80s, this was the first major renovation/installation I did on my own

It’s funny too–I keep saying “We”–it was really just me, I was all alone back then–I used to do the installations and then come back the next week to water the plants myself, but you have to start somewhere!