Flowers

I do not collect cacti because of their flowers, but they can be quite spectacular nevertheless (such as those of the echinopsis http://echinopsis.com/ genus). However, it’s a special enough event in my collection – New York weather is not ideal for growing cacti – that I do tend to take photos when that happens.

This is a gymnocactus gieseldorfianus I got at the San Gabriel Valley CSS (https://sgvcss.com/) Show and Sale this January. The exact plant I got is in the photo to the right, bluer but smaller.

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This is a corypantha cornifera that has not bloomed in three years. I like corpypanthas but I do not find them easy to grow, especially from seed: all my seedlings end up etiolated or stop growing and increasing the light has not done anything. They do not like being repotted either.

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The photo to the left is a rebutia. I keep this plant mostly because the beautiful bright orange flowers. Rebutias in general have bright colored flowers and bloom abundantly but they do not have particularly interesting bodies so I only have two in my collection. Dolichotele longimamma is a genus that is very dear to me as it was one of the first cacti I ever owned, about twenty years ago. It bloomed a lot and -the flowers have a gentle pleasant smell – and I repeatedly failed at reproducing it through offsets. One of the attempts eventually killed the mother plant later on.

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Here are some photos of my other typical bloomers, a copiapoa hypogaea being one the most surprising ones. Despite their reputation as difficult to grow I find copiapoas pretty easy. They are slow growers, but not the slowest (thelocactus riconensis holds that record in my collection) and none of them have died due to over-watering.

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This one is a night bloomer, which took me while to figure out – I kept assuming it was blooming while I was at work. Pretty spectacular flower but I collect this one because of the body which is quite unusual. This season it has been recovering from a spider mite infestation so there was no blooming. This, as many plants in my collection, is from Kyle’s plants ebay shop https://www.ebay.com/usr/kyles_plants.

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