The Cholla Cactus Garden in Joshua Tree National Park, California, USA

© Bryan Jolley/Tandem Stills + Motio

A garden of prickly delights

This prickly bunch are cholla cactus plants, part of a large collection found in the Joshua Tree National Park in the US state of California. You can identify them by their yellow spines, sitting on top of dark lower trunks. While they might look almost cuddly, don’t get too close: Those spines have tiny barbs which can latch onto your skin and be painful to remove. The Cholla Cactus Garden can be found near the centre of the 1,235 sq mile park, found where the Mojave and Colorado Deserts meet. Here you’ll find a wide variety of plant and animal life, including its iconic Joshua trees, a type of Yucca plant, which grow on the hills on the side of the park closest to the Mojave Desert, the driest desert in North America.