‘This cactus looks as if it’s preaching’: Joseph Cyr’s best phone picture

The language teacher was running in the desert in Arizona when he saw this enormous, oddly human-looking plant Joseph Cyr works as a language teacher at an American secondary school. He was born in South Korea, and spent his childhood living across Germany and the US, in Georgia and Arizona. “As an adult I have lived in Seattle, Paris and Nicaragua before moving back to Arizona,” he says. “I took this in Saguaro national park, on the edge of Tucson. It’s about an hour north of the US-Mexico border.” It was a school holiday, so Cyr was doing a trail run when he took this image. His route was quiet; he saw only a few people on horseback and this saguaro cactus. The largest cactus in the US, it grows only in the Sonoran Desert, where the Saguaro national park lies. “They can grow as tall as a six-storey building and live for more than two centuries,” Cyr says. “Their first arms don’t usually appear until the plant is 70 years old.” This particular example has a rare mutation: “According to the national park service, among the estimated 2m saguaros in the park, only about 75 crested saguaros have been found,” Cyr adds. “One can’t help but anthropomorphis

Apr 11, 2026 → Apr 14, 2026