When you think of Chicago, you probably don't think of sand dunes, prairies, or large oak trees. Yet despite Chicago being the third largest city in the United States and heavily impacted by urban sprawl and industrial blight, there remains thousands of acres of greenspace with wetlands, open woods, sandy beaches...and some rather surprising flora. The pictures below were not shot in Arizona nor in Southwest California, but were in fact taken at the 63rd street beach on a recently restored sand dune near Hyde Park in Chicago, Illinois. They are the eastern prickly pear cactus ( Opuntia humifusa ) . Figure 1: Eastern prickly pear cactus, a native plant to the Chicago region and the only native cactus to the Great Lakes area. The genus Opuntia is much more common out west where they have many different species, but in the Great Lakes and Midwest regions, the eastern prickly pear is the only native cactus. It tends to be a little bit smaller than its western counterp
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