[ noun ] any succulent plant of the family Cactaceae native chiefly to arid regions of the New World and usually having spines <noun.plant>
Cactus \Cac"tus\, n.; pl. E. {Cactuses}, {Cacti} (-t[=i]). [L., a kind of cactus, Gr. ??????.] (Bot.) Any plant of the order {Cactac[ae]}, as the prickly pear and the night-blooming cereus. See {Cereus}. They usually have leafless stems and branches, often beset with clustered thorns, and are mostly natives of the warmer parts of America.
{Cactus wren} (Zo["o]l.), an American wren of the genus {Campylorhynchus}, of several species.
Restaurant and gourmet shop purveyors savored caviar soup, cactus salsa and other eccentric vittles Monday at a 19,000-course meal: the international fancy-food trade show.
The ground is covered with prickly pear cactus and creosote bushes, the high, spindly ocotillo called buggy whips and the needle-pointed lechuguilla.
People that never heard of the Treaty Oak before _ wouldn't know the Treaty Oak from a cactus _ are now clamoring for blood," Kirk said.
She led him to the hole in the ground where the old cactus had stood.
All they have to do is look south across the Mexican border to see the unholy bleakness of the very same desert practically laid bare by cactus rustlers and smugglers.
Hundreds of the world's endangered plants, from tiny Indonesian orchids to the giant saguaro cactus of Arizona, have found a home in a cluster of government-run greenhouses where they are nursed back from the brink of extinction.
Here we have a lot of cactus and rocks and mesquite trees and live-oak trees." Being a speciality fabric, mohair is especially vulnerable to the fancy of fashion designers.
If you don't get water coming out of the drain hole within one or two minutes, a cactus will slowly dry up and die in it.
The insects brought the cactus under control.
The next cactus you see some night along the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas just might be a National Guardsman gathering intelligence information on drug trafficking.
Peyote, also known as mescal, comes from a small cactus that grows in Mexico and the southwestern United States.
I drove south to the sea at Agia Ana, past sloping fields dotted with windmills and cactus and ablaze with a spring carpet of wind-whipped daisies and poppies.
In one incident, troops were suspected of throwing the victims into cactus bushes after beating them, the daily Haaretz reported.
For the most part, this and other retirement communities in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas are homely clusters of campers, trailers, vans and mobile homes, popping up on the scrub land as capriciously as the cactus.
Such was their dedication that luck played only a minor role in catching the thieves who stole the great cactus that wound up in the Las Vegas nursery.
A rutted dirt road provides the only access to the remote, treeless base, surrounded by ranches thick with brush and cactus.