Friday Fabulous Flowers - Reliables

OK it's a bright shiny new year 2017, so TPP wants to start out on the right note with a FFF posting that is only 2 days late.  For long time readers, sorry, we're revisiting some old favorites.  At any rate several of our long time tropical plants, ones that summer outside, tend to flower right around New Years, perhaps in response to the long nights.  They tend to be very cheerful and welcome additions to our holidays and some of these plants have been flowering for us every year for a couple of decades, or even more. 
The absolute best one is a bromeliad commonly called the Queen's tears. It's just so exotic.  It's been a FFF more than once, here and here. It displays such a unique combination of colors and in particular the green petals with a blue edge. They don't last long so you just have to enjoy them when they are present.
Another very cheerful winter flowering plant is an epiphytic tropical cactus.  And it's been a FFF before too.  The plant is quite large now and several hundred of these 1 cm long gold-yellow flowers is quite a display. This poor plant got savaged by some of our tree rats 2 years ago, but has quite recovered now. This is such an easy plant to grow, but while in a hanging pot, it's too heavy now for a ceiling hook, even a well secured one.   

Friday Fabulous Flower - Hatoria salicornoides

Here's a nice tough house plant, although ours resides outside for almost half of the year.  It's name if Hatoria salicornoides, a specific epithet that means "like Salicornia", a halophyte (salt-loving) marsh or tidal plain plant (glasswort, pickleweed) with lots of sort of knobby branches that are narrow at their base and widening abruptly toward the apex. TPP sort of sees the resemblance, but not really. At any rate the plant is a much branched cactus whose stems become woody with age. Here in January a golden bell of a flower forms at the end of each branch so the flowering display is considerable, hundreds of flowers.
This tropical cactus is an epiphyte with drooping branches and it grows well in a mixture of fine orchid mix and cactus soil in a hanging basket, which gets hung on a big shepard's hook in some light shade beyond our patio. Once or twice squirrels have chewed on it and inflicted some considerable damage, but the plant has always recovered.  The plant deals with the household dryness of winter and needs watering only about once a week when outside, often taken care of by rain. While not spectacular, it's a very nice reliable plant and showier than the more common Rhipsalis species people often have. 

Friday Fabulous Flower - night blooming cereus

One of the toughest and ugliest plants in our glasshouse is a night blooming cereus (Hylocereus undatus - probably).  It grows up the aluminum struts and occupies the space at the top ends, some of the hottest and coldest, wettest and driest places there.  No one ever tends it hardly, and then every now and again it will issue forth a set of flowers, often all at once.  The flower buds are almost 12" long (30 cm) and about 2" (5 cm) in diameter.  The perianth parts are numerous and spirally arranged starting out green at the bottom of the bud and shifting to white of the innermost parts.  The fully open corolla can span 8-9".  Within the light green to cream colored corolla are hundreds of stamens and a large mop-like stigma (quite obvious in the image above).  This position allows it to pick up incoming pollen before the floral visit gets a new dousing with pollen.  These flowers open at night because they are bat pollinated, and bats must be really good, really reliable pollinators for a plant to invest so much in a short-lived flower.  One pollination event can result in hundreds of seeds.  At any rate few people ever get to see the show because of the nocturnal flowering.  And of course our glasshouse lacks blossom bats. This image is courtesy of Harvey McDaniel, Wikimedia Creative Commons.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Pencil cactus

Yes, it's Saturday (forget this, it's Thursday, it took that long to get the image where it could be uploaded), but the idea to blog this came yesterday.  One to TPP's favorite winter flowering plants is a pencil cactus (Hatiora salicornoides, probably).  The stem segments are knobbier than most illustrations or photographs show, but haven't found a better candidate yet.  At any rate my plant is now a couple of decades old, and it's gotten pretty large, maybe 3 feet from top of the crown to bottom of the cascading branches.  In nature it grows as an epiphyte generally sort of cascading down from the crotch of a tree. The oldest stems are about a half inch in diameter and woody.  The flowers aren't large, but when a cute little yellow flower is produced at the tip of nearly every one of the several hundred branches, it makes for quite a cheerful winter display.  This is another one of those plants that loves being outside for the summer although of late it has taken some effort to find something stout enough to bear the weight of this increasingly massive cactus.  Otherwise this is an easy plant to grow.