United States or Vanuatu ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
So Sally stayed to have one of those long night-talks in which girls delight, in the course of which all sorts of intimacies and confidences, that shun the daylight, open like the night-blooming cereus in strange successions. One often wonders by daylight at the things one says very naturally in the dark.
"Mamma, darling, I have looked forward with a great deal of expectancy to the time when my cereus should bloom, I now know my hope in this respect will not be realized, but I want you, mother, when it opens out its pure white petals and its fragrance perfumes the midnight air to remember I shall be in heaven among fairer flowers, with sweeter perfume; for they have not been cursed by sin.
Others, standing as erect as bushes and trees or tall branchless pillars crowned with magnificent flowers, their prickly armor sparkling, look boldly abroad over the glaring desert, making the strangest forests ever seen or dreamed of. Cereus giganteus, the grim chief of the desert tribe, is often thirty or forty feet high in southern Arizona.
Fences and walls are altogether buried by passion-flowers, the night-blowing Cereus, and the tropaeolum, mixed with geraniums, fuchsia, and jessamine, which cluster and entangle over them in indescribable profusion. A soft air moves through the upper branches, and the drip of water from miniature fountains falls musically on the perfumed air. This is midwinter!
It may be grown on a shelf in a warm greenhouse, or in the window of a heated dwelling-room. Introduced, probably from Mexico, in 1845. This, like all the small, globular-stemmed kinds, may be grafted on the stem of a Cereus of suitable thickness.
Flowers fragrant, 6 in. across, resembling those of the night-blossoming Cereus grandiflorus; sepals greenish-white, petals pure white. A compact plant, with numerous large, brick-red flowers, 5 in. to 6 in. in diameter. P. Conway's Giant. Flowers full, deep scarlet, about 8 in. in diameter. An English hybrid, remarkable for its large, beautiful yellow flowers.
But on we went, with a warning not to be upset if we could avoid it, in the shape of a shark's back fin above the oily swell; and under Huevos, and round into a lonely cove, with high crumbling cliffs bedecked with Cereus and Aloes in flower, their tall spikes of green flowers standing out against the sky, twenty or thirty feet in height, and beds of short wild pine- apples, like amber-yellow fur, and here and there hanging leaves trailing down to the water; and on into a nook, the sight of which made us give up all hopes of the cave, but which in itself was worth coming from Europe to see.
A sort of candied preserve and molasses, expressed from the fruit of the cereus giganteus and agave Americana was found by our party in 1851, as we passed through the Pinal Llano camps and among the Gila tribes, to be most acceptable. The candied preserve was a most excellent substitute for sugar.
The golden-hued peta was found beside the myriad-flowering oleander and the night-blooming cereus, while the luxuriant undergrowth was braided with the cactus and the aloe. They were also delighted by tropical fruits in confusing variety, of which they knew not even the names.
In the case of Cactuses, however, we resort to grafting, not because of any difficulty in obtaining the kinds thus treated from either cuttings or seeds, as we have already seen that all the species of Cactuses grow freely from seed, or are easily raised from cuttings of their stems, nor yet to effect any change in the characters of the plants thus treated, but because some of the more delicate kinds, and especially the smaller ones, are apt to rot at the base during the damp, foggy weather of our winters; and, to prevent this, it is found a good and safe plan to graft them on to stocks formed of more robust kinds, or even on to plants of other genera, such as Cereus or Echinocactus.
Word Of The Day