My Fancy Plant

Just thought I'd stick this up, although it will be of little interest to anyone not of the green-fingered persuasion. My Christmas Cactus which I got from Tesco some years ago is mental.

How mental? This mental:



Looks good yeah? For those not familiar with these plants, a flowering period is usually once a year, and you might get say 30 flowers each time over the whole plant. I'd estimate in excess of 200 big ones here. I haven't fed it or given it any undue attention, and it's normally sat quietly on a NW facing window with a dash of water every few days. It's usually a sign of a happy plant that its full of flowers (indeed, I've never had a plant that's so completely overtaken with them), so what's the problem?

Last year, once it had finished flowering, the back half of the plant fell off and died, and its not even close to recovering. What remains is not flowering, so much as **FLOWERING**, as if it knew of some approaching Armageddon and wanted to have one last flourish while it could. Each spur has at least one flower, often three or four - that's a lot of energy spent just to make my staircase look pretty.

My guess is that last year the poor plant exhausted itself with its mad flowering spree and just had to jettison the parts that weren't getting so much light.

This begs the question: is it about to happen again?