Last night, September 27, a rare treat was accorded a number of Shanghai people, myself included, who were invited to the home of Mr. R. Laurenz, well known member of the local German community, to watch the opening of some fifty blossoms on his fine plant of night-blooming cereus (Cereus grandiflorus), These magnificent white blossoms commenced opening a little before nine o'clock. In about twenty minutes the miracle was complete, and the plant stood there covered with gorgeous many-rayed white stars gleaming in the darkness of the garden, or revealed in all their matchless beauty by the light flashed on them from elec-trio torches. The plant, which, I am informed, is now some 23 years old, stands about 7 feet high in its pot. Originally grown from a single section of "leaf" it was seven years old before it commenced to bloom. The maximum number of blossoms it has borne at one time up to the present has been a dozen or so. A photograph of this same plant with twelve or thirteen flowers was reproduced in the November, 1931, issue of "The China Journal" as its fron-tis piece. It is almost impossible to describe adequately the beauty of the blossom of the night-blooming cereus, for it must be one of the loveliest flowers in existence, if not the love-hest. Shaped like a trumpet with its long, curved stem directed downwards as it hangs from the edge or tip of a "leaf" and its mouth directed outwards from the plant, the blossom is-composed of a large number of waxy white petals of extreme delicacy. Indeed, its name, Cereus, is derived from the Latin word cora, meaning wax. The stem of the trumpet and numerous slender outside petals and bracts are of a crimson-madder colour. Inside the mouth of the trumpet the numerous pale yellow stamens are so arranged as to form a boat-shaped basket, while the pistil, in the form of a white star at the end of a long white stalk, lies in front of this basket, The total length of this magnificent blossom is some 10 to 12 inches, while the diameter of the mouth of the trumpet may be as much as 8 inches. The night-blooming cereus is a species of cactus and originates in Central America. It has been widely distribute human agency throughout tropical counties, and, as a hothouse plant, in more temperate regions. In Hawaii it grows in hedges, and one of the sights of these islands consists of the hedges of cereus in full bloom. The flowers have a wonderful fragrance all their own. They last but one night, drooping and withering away early next day. As already indicated, they grow from the margins, sometimes the extreme tips, of what look like the leaves of the plant. But these are not really leaves, since cactuses do not have the latter. They are really flattened-out stems which fulfil the function of leaves. Allowed to stand in the open during the warmer months, instead of being kept in the hothouse, the splendid plant here described, three times every summer, in June, in August and late in September. It is, of course, the hothouse daring the winter, for, it cannot withstand
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.