First flower of winter

December 25th, Christmas Day, 2015.  After a morning of exchanging gifts and eating breakfast, the Phactors took a 6000+ stride walk, according to Mrs. Phactor's new fitness accessory, basically TPP's round trip to campus, a lovely walk during which a friend photographed a black squirrel.  TPP knows about melanistic squirrels but had never seen one around here. Checked out the surrounding neighborhood to see where things were going well and where things need some work. But upon our return home and while picking up all the downed limbs from a recent windy night, you have perhaps heard of our oak tree that hates rhododendrons (an anti-rabbit fence made a save), well that limb had many companions around the property. But there it was defiantly yellow in the middle of our ecologically diverse lawn, the first flower of winter, and here it was only the 4th official day of winter, i.e., since the solstice.  Technically it's an inflorescence, so dozens of flowers, but  you know what TPP means. 
What an unexpected splash of color totally emphasizing the unusual nature of our weather of late. US weather services report so many temperature records and other stuff that December 2015 will go down as one of the most anomalous months in weather history.  So no wonder plants are confused, and in the long haul, confused plants are not a good thing. Now our lawn flora is nothing to worry about, but when fruit trees flower too early, you lose your crop to the cold snap that follows.  Highly unpredictable weather will have an impact on our food supply.  So yes, you may look upon the 1st flower of winter as a harbinger of things to come that will not be good. Welcome to the weather of climate change. 

Holiday flowering

It's been a good holiday season for flowering. As a consequence of spending summers and early fall outside, almost all of our tropical houseplants regularly flower. This was a particularly good year because so many plants came into flower at one time, but some were sort of over whelmed by the holiday decorations. Nonetheless several visitors did notice and appreciate several of them. So here's the list: forced paper white narcissas, the queen's tears (a bromeliad), a mistletoe cactus, the big blue bromeliad, an azalea (which itself gets decorated), an Aeschynanthus (a gesner), an orchid (an unknown hybrid). On the whole a pretty cheerful display. Although all have their charm, the queen's tears is a favorite because of the unusual combination of colors, which is good because otherwise the plant is not particularly attractive. Most of these have been featured in this blog before, thus the links.

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.