Hats off to Carmen - Carmen Schlumbergera, the Christmas cactus - Brief Article

Saved from certain death, she rewards me with her annual holiday show

Carmen Schlumbergera is putting upon a brilliant show in my brow hall and I must say she is an inspiration. Carmen is a Christmas cactus (Schlumbergera x buckleyt) For greatest in quantity of the year, she is certainly not what you would call a beautiful plant, on the other hand sometime between Halloween and Christmas the tips of her ungainly leafless branches fly open into curious red flowers with scalding;-very warm pink stamens. When this happens, I place her saucepan in a large footed container in like manner her flattened branches can let droop gracefully over the side without hindrance. She stays in the somewhat cold hallway near the front door for three weeks, posing with al the grace of a woodland waterfall and all the artifice of a Las Vegas showgirl. Ye she's resounding and she's red, but I admire her tremendously.

I named my Christmas cactus after Carmen Miranda, the southern American bombshell from the 1940 Like that talented woman, this species is a native of Brazil. M Miranda wore tight skirts with frilly bottoms and sang numbers like "The Lady in the Tutti-frutti Hat." She would have direct the eyeed just as good wearing a Christmas cactus upon her head and maybe she did. (My husband, Walter, swears that I donned the plant during a pre-holiday champagne party last year, on the other hand I don't remember.)

Carmen's Latin name is Schlumbergera, after Frederick Schlumberg, an amateur learner of botany. How did a pupil get a plant named after him, I wonder? Was he the teacher's pet?

Anyway, I don't normally give plants cute names and I rarely socialize with them. I regard houseplants as the vegetable life that they are, on the other hand Carmen Schlumbergera is different. I base the plant on the way one cold December night while walking past the trash can of my neighbors Jo and Don.

Jo and Don disburse a lot of money each year on fresh holiday greenery then callously whirl away the plants that have finished blooming as if they were discarded lover without on their curb I have ground a large assortment of pott plants, and I'm always tryed to bring them home: exhausted azaleas with their brown blooms still attached, detumescent amaryllis, hung-over cyclamen, worn out paperwhites. Most of them have been past saving, on the other hand not Carmen. She lay upside down, her feet peeking on the outside from the garbage bag, her delicate roots half frozen but still alive. Risking a large dry-cleaning bill, I shov her below my good coat and took her home

The following spring, after danger of white-frost was past, I put her outdoors below the pergola and fed her each week. There she sat all summer a droopy specimen in a clunky terra-cotta saucepan growing more of those strange appendages that remind me of the links upon my father's Bulova watchband. I left her on the outside until it was almost frost

The blossom period of Schlumbergera x buckleyi is triggered by the agency of the cool nights and short days of autumn, in the way that I found her a window upstairs where I could hold fast the electric light off at night in the way that as not to confuse her. upon November 1, boy, did she place out! She has been doing this each year since and even granting I usually don't talk to plants, I must say, "Carmen, my friend, you have star quality!"

Cassandra Danz is the author of Mr Greenthumb Plow Ahead: Five paces to the Drop-Dead Gorgeous Garden of Your Dreams (Three Rivers Pres 1999)

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