Queen of the Night, queen of the storm

Just over a year ago, a neighbor gave me a cutting of her Queen of the Night cactus. It's an epiphyte, which is to say that it doesn't root in the ground, but spreads out in an attempt to anchor itself in tree branches in (South American) jungles. Its Latin name is Epiphyllum oxypetalum.

The plant flowers just once in summer and is unlikely to bear fruit as it needs a nearby relative for pollination. (Since it's a cutting of my neighbor's, it's genetically identical, and hers, alas, won't do it.) But what a show it puts on for those one or two nights!

The plant is about two meters across at its widest part, for scale.

The flower, like the Dragon Fruits I've mentioned elsewhere, has male and female parts. The many yellow heads on long filaments are anthers, covered with pollen. The structure at the front that looks like a starfish or spider is the stigma, the part that receives pollen. Behind the stigma is a tube called a style, and that leads to the ovule, where the fruit will form. Pollen is deposited on the stigma and grows all the way down to the ovule to fertilize the fruit. 

The reason why everything is soaking is that the photos were taken during Tropical Storm Hilary. It doesn't normally rain three inches in a day in August in Southern California. I don't know why the plant decided to flower on the only day it has ever been indoors, sheltering. I had to take it back out into the storm so they could fully open.