Night Blooming Cereus, Epiphyllum

Wind blew the smallest pot of Night Blooming Cereus off the carport ledge and broke the ceramic pot. It lay on the concrete for a day until I finally stuffed it into a plastic nursery pot. The bud hung on and last night it opened.



The pets enjoyed the attention paid the flower because it meant humans came outside past bedtime.

You can see other, better pictures of epiphyllum blooms here: Night Blooming Cactus on my Seedscatterer Blog.

Angel Trumpets

Buffy and I rode to Nearest Town with Lane, who wanted to make sure his truck air conditioner was working properly. We drove through the cemetery. The lawn maintenance crew was at work, mowing. Apparently they have a new service. The old service would mow the driveways, skipping the sides next to the lots of people who don't pay for their service. The new service does the sensible thing, mowing the entire drive, then maintaining the lots that pay. The old service would stop, raise the riding mower blade, skip a non-payer, and then resume mowing 20 feet down, leaving an unmowed strip the width of the mower next to the offending lot. Their more intensive work is to weed-eat the grass of the lots and edge around the grave markers and slabs over the graves, or to kill weeds that come up in the lots that have gravel over cement. Our lot has the single grave of the Monkeyman. We do our own maintenance. We mowed our edges of the drives, but the lots that are not maintained made the drives look unkepmt with all that skipping the edges in spots.

We went to the gas station, and to the grocery for milk. As we left the store, we passed a house with a small front yard that had pretty flower beds in front with a huge peach colored Angel Trumpet in full bloom very near the street.

Lane and the Dog are trying to get me to look on the other side of the street at the cat they spotted, and I'm trying to get his attention about the Brugmansia. I had a camera in my pocket. Missed opportunity!

Butterflies are Returning

I rushed out into the twilight to take photos of the hyacinths. It was a point and click episode, because I could see very little. I'd point, click and watch the little window to see if my subject was in the frame. Imagine my surprise when I came in and the first photo of the mixed hyacinths showed something on one of the flowers. The next frame confirmed: butterflies! Two yellow sulphurs.

I hardly saw yellow sulphurs last year until late in the season.

A Bowl of Flowers

I asked one of my kin whose memories I pick for details of our fictive blog Mary Zelda if he had any idea what the occasion was that Mary, Blanche and Ethel had flowers in a huge bowl on the front walk? I must share his answer:

Great balls of blooming begonias. Look at your own inherited love of flowers! Did you ever know any of the Jones Girls to need a reason to display a bowl of flowers? We had flowers in the windows. We had flowers on the tables. We had flowers in the dining room. I couldn't walk outside without stepping on flowers. They even grew wild around the outhouse.

.... Flowers were all these precious girls could afford to make their harsh world more soft, tender, beautiful and feminine in a man's world filled with rocks, manure-covered ground, hand-hewn
lumber and lost siblings. After all, it was a man's world back then.