Forest has been watering the deck plants now, and I've missed some developments. The Epiphyllum anguliger, rickrack cactus or queen of the night, has quickly budded in response to the longer nights and cooler weather. It's burst into bloom to welcome autumn. The fragrance is wonderful, and there will be many flowers this year. I've loved this plant. The cladodes (stems modified to function like leaves) do indeed look like rickrack, and they remind me of Grandma Aker's aprons, which were always adorned with rickrack.
I did notice something amazing weeks ago. The rickrack cactus has a pot mate. Several years ago, I purchased a Schizaea dichotoma,comb fern, from Meehan's Miniatures at the Bonsai Festival. It grew in a pot with another fern and promptly died when exposed to low humidity indoors. Now it has inexplicably appeared in the very rootbound pot of the rickrack cactus. It's an interesting fern. The genus Schizaea is thought to represent a link between the whisk ferns and other ferns. At any rate, it must be a very covert fern, since I never noted spores on the fern that died, and both a male and female gametophyte must have been growing with the cactus and united to form the new fern. I've thought about putting it in another pot or terrarium, but I think I'll leave well enough alone.
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