kihaku-gato:

Before I start the usual banter let me start by making this an opportunity to inform via PLANT ID COMPARISONS FOR HORTICULTURAL BEGINNERS (cause kihaku is tired of this painfully common misID); Schlumbergera truncata to the left, Schlumbergera x buckleyi to the right. Market-wise S. truncata is pretty common, while S. buckleyi is rarely ever found in nurseries (it’s slower growth makes it unpopular for raising) and instead more likely to be found in the windowsills of pass-along plant growers like your favourite gardening grandma or aunt. For growth/nature S. truncata is faster to induce into bloom and comes in more floral colours, while S. buckleyi are slower to induce into flower and only come in pink (though there are rumors they come in white as well). S. truncata has mirror floral symmetry, while S. x buckleyi has radial floral symmetry. To keep this ID ramble shorter here’s a labelled illustration comparison from mattslandscape.com to sum up what I would say anyways:

Now that we got that correction out of the way let’s get to the usual banter again. Besides my Goldy truncata, these two are the last flowers of the season, and will be my last opportune attempt to cross them for the flowering season. I’ll be labelling/documenting the cross once I get the plant-tags ready. This year has been a rather poor in crossing successes, which may be due to anything from the plants being stressed to just the temperatures/times being different with my crosses from last year. So we’ll see if at least these two take.

Also FUNNILY enough despite all of those Schlumbergera seedlings growing right now that I showed a week or so ago, those are not ALL of the Schlumbergera crosses sown; the fruit from the S. x buckleyi is still taking it’s sweet time to ripen it’s fruits. Guess it’s not just the flowers that take ages to mature. At least this means a few less seeds/seedlings to tend to for a while longer.

Photographed March 1st 2016

Bringing this old post back purely cause of the floral diagram and the fact it’s Christmas/Thanksgiving Cacti season.