I know some gardeners look forward to a break from garden work in the off season, but many of us like to keep the plant life going indoors! For me, for many years, indoors was my only gardening, when I lived in cities, mostly without so much as a balcony. Even now, with a lot of outdoor space, there is no way I could be satisfied with the few short months that plants are actively growing outdoors here, much less abandon my long developed and developing interests in particular groups of sub/tropical plants...
My oldest and still main interest is in cacti and succulents, so I'll start with a plant that flowered last night - this is Discocactus zentneri a cactus from areas of rocky outcrops/quartz deposits in a semi-arid/seasonally dry part of Brasil. Plants in this genus form a cephalium- a sort of dense wooly growth on top of the main vegetative body- once they reach maturity, and after that the main body does not get much if at all larger, just produces offsets and flowers. Because of the cephalium, early bud development is hidden, and the bids suddenly appear in the daytime, reaching maturity and flowering overnight, for just one night! My plant does not seem to be notably scented, though some are, and flowers open at /after dusk (depending on season here) and close before dawn, so I can only take flash pictures or in ambient light (no photo light set-up currently) meaning they are usually kind of crappy shots...lol It flowers for me usually a couple or several times a year from spring through fall, and gets no water over winter..
Unfortunately my plant is a little homely since I bought it with the dumb straw flower glued on, and not knowing anything about cephalia at the time, didn't realise that any spines lost in removing the straw flower would not be moved lower down the body out of sight as they do when other cacti grow- so it has that bald area on the upper sides permanently! Lower down is a dense skirt of offsets...
A page for the genus:
http://www.discocactus.nl/Engels/speciesE/speciesE.htm
