The ruby red fruit ripen in June. Each fruit contains around 2000 seeds plus sweet fleshy connective tissue. The fruit are highly edible and prized by local people. The O'odham tribes have a long and rich history of saguaro fruit use.
The saguaro is often used as an emblem in commercials and logos that attempt to convey a sense of the southwest, even if the product has no connection to Arizona, or the Sonoran Desert. For instance, no saguaros are found within 250 miles (400 km) of El Paso, Texas, but the silhouette is found on the label of Old El Paso brand products. Though the geographic anomaly has lessened in recent years, Western films once enthusiastically placed saguaros in Monument Valley of Arizona, as well as New Mexico, Utah and Texas. There are no wild saguaros anywhere in such western U.S. states as Texas, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, or Nevada, nor in the high deserts of northern Arizona. To point this out the Texas rockabilly band the Reverend Horton Heat has a song "Ain't No Saguaro In Texas".
The saguaro scientific name Carnegiea gigantea) is a large, tree-sized cactus species in the monotypic genus Carnegiea. It is native to the Sonoran Desert in the U.S. state of Arizona, the Mexican state of Sonora, a small part of Baja California in the San Felipe Desert and an extremely small area of California, U.S. The saguaro blossom is the State Wildflower of Arizona.
The common name saguaro came into the English language through the Spanish language, originating in the O'odham language.