Epiphyllums

AKA orchid cacti. I've had these beauties over thirty years.

 

They winter in my little green house and are kinda ugly most of the year. Then they put on a show.

I presume they're related to Christmas cacti and Night Blooming Cereus. I have some of those too but they aren't in bloom.

 

A Good Year for Epiphyllums

 

                                                                                                

Our greenhouse is home to an assortment of these lovelies--also known as orchid cactus. I acquired my first one (the one pictured here) about forty years ago (can it have been that long?) when Justin was in a youth soccer league and my friend Sue (whose son was also playing,) found ourselves in an unfamiliar part of Asheville and after the game, just had to check out a local greenhouse. 

                                                                                                  

They had a wonderful selection of epiphyllums in various colors, but they weren't cheap, and I had to be content with selecting the gaudiest of the lot.                                                                                         

The weather has been too uncertain to put them outside yet, but they have been blooming exuberantly in the crowded greenhouse.

Somewhere along the way, I was given this red variety below.

And my friend Lisa S. brought me this dainty pink one below.  

When the weather is reliably warm, I'll try to get these babies outside and do some repotting and propagating. May they all last another forty years!

Orchid Cacti -- Epiphyllums

One Man's Meat

This book of deceptively simple and simply wise essays is a compilation of White's monthly columns for Harper's  plus three essays from The New Yorker -- the first written in July of 1938 and the last in January of 1943.  White and his family had moved from New York City to a saltwater farm in Maine and the essays range from his adjustment to a new way of life to animal husbandry, his neighbors, and, increasingly, to the looming threat in Europe. 

Though the last essay was written a month before I was born, the entire book resonates with me on many levels -- the escape to a rural life being one.  But this is no "Green Acres"  -- no poking fun at the city folk who are trying to be farmers. Rather, in the quiet intervals of raising chickens, sheep, and pigs, as well as milking a cow, White has time to think and write. And many of these thoughts seem eerily appropriate 

today.

"Clearly the race today is between loud speaking and soft, between the things that are and the things that seem to be. . . Television will enormously enlarge the eye's range and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. . . it will insist we forget the primary and near in favor of the secondary and remote. . .

"When I was a child, people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad."

Or this, written just after Pearl Harbor: "There's one lady I know who has it worked it out that we have been at war for some years now. She is an inveterate radio listener, and whenever she hears static she thinks it's the Germans, communicating with their local spies. . . I suspect she is nearer right than most of us. It is better to hear messages in static than to hear no messages in anything: think of the people who have listened to the rumbling and crackling of National Socialism for the past six or eight years without detecting any ominous sound!"

 And this: "The passionate love of Americans for their America will have a lot to do with winning the war. It is an odd thing though: the very patriotism on which we now rely must eventually be in part relinquished if the world is ever to find a lasting peace. . .

"Before you can be a supranationalist you have first to be a naturalist and feel the ground under you making a whole circle. It is easier for a man to be loyal to his club than to his planet; the bylaws are shorter and he is personally acquainted with the other members. A club, moreover, or a nation, has a most attractive offer to make: it offers the right to be exclusive . . .It is at the bottom of all fraternities, societies, orders. It is at the bottom of most trouble. The planet holds out no such inducement. The planet is everybody's. All it offers is the grass, the sky, the water, and the ineluctable dream of peace and fruition."

I have to stop myself from quoting anymore, though my copy of the book bristles with markers. You'll have to read it for yourself. 

Highly recommended. (With grateful thanks to California Josie for sending me a copy.)