Succulents with Flowers
As if succulent plants aren’t already intriguing and beautiful enough, on top of their interesting textures and forms some of them also have the most incredible flowers.
Often, they are the form of tiny crowns – Sempervivum flowers in magnification are beautiful!
Flowering succulents range from simply interesting, to gorgeous, to outright flamboyant.
It’s almost as if they figure they won’t attract the right insects if they’re too subtle, so they produce these incredibly complex and colorful flowers.
Some produce tall sprays of delicate pale green and pale pink trumpets, like Haworthia. Echeveria bloom in season, usually in the fall, depending on where you are.
Collect the seeds to grow your own new plants.
Aloe flowers are beloved by hummingbirds, and Aloe bloom stalks tower over trees and buildings alike.
One huge botanical greenhouse had to remove part of the roof to give the flower stalk room to grow!
Some attract insects by scent, sometimes not the kind of perfume that attracts us, in the case of Stapelia and Huernia.
These are also known as Carrion Flowers, so that should give you an indication of how they smell.
Others, like many of the Kalanchoe species offer spires and spikes of bell like blooms, in multi colored striped and blended flowers. Then stripes and spots are known as ‘bee guides’ and assist the pollinators in finding the nectar.
Some flowers use perfume to help the insects locate them – if you’ve ever had the unique experience of the Queen of the Night blooming at midnight, you’ll know first hand how strong a fragrance it is, and specifically evolved to attract moths to pollinate them.
Stapelia and Huernia are known as ‘carrion flowers’ because of the smell of rotting meat, designed to draw in flies to perform that same role.
Kalanchoe daigremontiana, the Mother of Thousands plant, has fabulous cascading flowers of pink or peach colors.
Many others in the genus are equally as gorgeous in bloom, like the Kalanchoe x houghtonii below;
Cactus plants are renowned for their gorgeous fleeting tissue paper flowers, only after a long period of drought.
Ephiphytes like Schlumbergera and Epiphyllum are misleadingly dull – until they flower with masses of flowers all at once, or with dinner plate sized orchid blooms.
Other colonizing plants make a carpet of texture, but when they burst into flower it adds a whole new dimension. Most succulents lift their flowers high into the air on arching stems, probably to make it easier for insects to find them.
They are also seasonal and bloom in fall, winter or spring, giving them their name of Holiday Cactus – Thanksgiving Cactus flower in the fall, Christmas Cactus around the Christmas holiday and Easter Cactus in spring.
Succulent flowers come in all shapes and sizes, but most are designed by nature to attract their pollinators – insects.
See more Flowering Succulents here…
…maybe yours is here…
Help identify my plant!
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