Cereus hildmannianus

Well, a few posts back I was talking about how this plant fell over and got beheaded, I thought I'd give a little update...



as you can see, the two small branches that were coming up from the bottom of the plant have grown from about 3 inches to 8 in a relatively short period of time... thriving off a root system that was established to support a 4 foot plant no doubt. The top of the stump has begun a branch right below the break, and the one branch that was already there has put on about 6 inches of growth also.

The two 'logs' that I laid down on their side in the flower bed show no signs of new arms coming up, nor do they show any signs of throwing roots into the soil like the guys on the web-site said they would, but I'm not giving up. They'll probably do everything suddenly in the space of a day... the actual growing tip, which was damaged in the fall, and I cut off, is about 5 inches, has established roots... so it should start growing anytime now... I placed it in a pot of portaluca... I have three rectangular pots of portaluca sitting on a brick wall out front. They bloom like crazy all summer, and whatever random cuttings happen tend to get stuck in there, so there's always some encheveria, semperverium, sedum and what-not rooting in the light shade of the annuals.

It's kind of time for me to start looking for a bigger pot, so I can get all these cereus cuttings planted together into one pot to save room when I have to bring it in come fall.

Also in the yard is a Golden Cat-tail... Cleistocactus winteri. This is a great plant that produces wonderful bright red blooms, but doesn't seem particularly inclined to this year... don't know why.



But, the lack of blooms is more than made up for in the new growth that's it's decided to put out this summer...

Cereus hildmannianus

This is my Cereus Hildmannianus... one of the about 2 dozen cactus species referred to as Queen of the Night, sometimes called Peruvian Apple. (I call it Hildy...)



It's not blooming right now, this is from last year... I'm probably not going to get any blooms from it this year...



I've had the plant for about 10 years, got it when it was less than a foot tall on a clearance table at one of the local nurseries. Since then, it grew to about 4 feet tall, and put out one branch (on the other side of the plant in this pic) and puts out a couple of dozen blooms a year, about 8 inches across and at night. It's not winter hardy here, being only capable of surviving occasional light frosts, so I bring it in every winter and let it go dormant. This carting back and forth is probably why I was resisting putting it in a larger pot... which I regret now, as it turned out to be so top heavy that the last wind-storm blew it over and broke it off.



Before this, it was doing fairly well... It had two more trunks coming up from the base of the plant, both about 3 inches tall now.



Fortunately, the break was just above the branch, so now it's a stump with a foot tall branch sticking out of the side, and a couple of other branches coming from the bottom... in about a year it may have put out more branches from the trunk, so it'll end up fine. As for the pieces broke off... I've cut the growing tip off and put it in a pot to root... and the rest of the trunk, about two feet, has been cut into two pieces and laid flat on the ground in one of the flower beds. I have it on good authority from an Internet search that it will throw roots into the ground, and then start sprouting growth all along the pieces... I'll get anywhere from six to a dozen new plants to break off and root individually... I'll probably end up putting them all into one really huge pot, with the mother trunk in the middle.



But all this trauma may have ruined my chances of seeing any of the 8-inch wide blooms glowing in the moonlight this year...



Tracing the origins of this plant has proved to be a challenge for botanist... It's probably native to South America. The problem is that the plant, which can attain heights of over 15 feet in the right climate, has been grown as an ornamental, as well as for it's edible fruit, for so long that there are no records of it's original native land.



We'll see how everything works out.