Friday Fabulous Flower - Cactus

OK in an effort to get a day/date disconnect resolved, TPP thought why not do something unusual like do a FFF on an actual Friday.  People won't expect that.  One of our favorite house plants is in full bloom and it is so very cheerful,  Hatiora salicornioides.  This is a epiphytic or orchid cactus that used to be in the genus Rhipsalis.   The specific epithet is sort of interesting because it means it looks like a well-known halophyte Salicornia.  This particular plant has gotten big, probably 50 lbs big and the largest and oldest stems are quite woody.  At any rate there are hundreds of drooping stems and each one bears a golden yellow flower at its terminus.  Each segment has a slender portion and then a thick succulent portion.  

Now here's an image of some Salicornia growing in a salt marsh at low-tide.  It doesn't look like this very much except for the many segments and the succulence.  

Friday Fabulous Flower - Thanksgiving Cactus

The extreme seasonality of north central Lincolnland produces three months of tropical weather, three months of arctic weather, and two 3 month periods of very changeable transition. Long ago the Phactor discovered that his tropical plants performed very well if they were quartered outside, hanging from arbors and tree limbs, mostly in light shade, with short sunny periods for the warmer months, usually from late May until September, or like this year, October. Once the nights start getting cold they get unhappy. The shorter days and cooler weather of early fall are quite good at promoting flowering, and people who complain about their house plants not flowering invariably leave them inside year around, and keeping them in well-lit rooms (long nights stimulate flowering). So a month after moving back inside, right on cue, the Thanksgiving cactus (probably Schlumberger truncata, or a similar species, or even a hybrid of this species) began flowering. This particular group of cacti is native to tropical forests of Brazil where they grow as epiphytes. As adaptions to this habitat of frequent rain and rapid drying, tropical or so-called orchid cacti lack the thick spiny stems that most people think are characteristic of cacti and have flattened, leaf-like stems. Certainly the flower is quite spectacular and clearly adapted for hummingbird pollination. You can see how a hummingbird flying in to prob this flower for a nectar reward will upon arrival have its head and neck contact the exerted stigma (red nob)and stamens, both delivering and picking up pollen in that order. Unfortunately this cactus never flowers early enough to interact with our native ruby-throated hummingbirds before one migrates south and the other moves indoors.

Winter flowers - Indoor Tropical Plants

You can take the biologist out of the tropics, but you can't take the tropics out of the biologist. A number of tropical plants actually thrive living out of doors during our generally hot, humid midwestern summers until early fall, hung from shepard's hooks in semi-shade or convenient oak limbs. Once the temperatures begin falling below 50F, they get moved inside for the duration of fall and winter.

The interesting thing is that this move stimulates regular flowering from December to February, a great indoor display of botanical color. Here's one of the Phactor's long time favorites: Billbergia nutans, the Queen's tears, a bromeliad or a member of the pineapple family. The combination of pink bracts and calyx, green ovary and petals, outlined in blue, and the yellow stamens is very striking and a quite unique color combination.

This plant grows well in a 50:50 combination of orchid mix and cactus potting "soil". Every two weeks the entire hanging basket is showered throughly and allowed to drain before rehanging.

Another reliable and easy to grow tropical plants that reliably flowers under this indoor-outdoor regiem is one of the orchid cacti that another blogger has illustrated so nicely. Enjoy.