Random plant event: Kalanchoe thyrsifolia flowers

What is it with desert plants wanting to put their flowers way high in the air, anyway? Are there no pollinators near the ground? I'm just wondering.

I've been waiting for this one for a while; we got it in June, and although it seemed to be doing more or less okay, the new leaves kept getting smaller and smaller, which irked me: now nobody's ever going to want to buy you, I told it. Then at some point I realized it was a flower spike, and stopped haranguing, because I figured surely it would sell once the flowers (which I was envisioning as tubular red-orange things, like on Bryophyllum tubiflorum and Bryophyllum daigremontianum) appeared. But no blooms appeared, for months: it just kept getting taller instead:


So finally they started to open, and they turn out not to be all that terribly interesting: like K. blossfeldiana, but without the bright colors or abundance of flowers that makes blossfeldiana (barely) worthwhile.


I suppose I shouldn't be all that surprised. I tried to keep one of these indoors once, several years back, and then again in the last couple years, and . . . let's just say that this is not the first time this plant has disappointed me.

Probably some of the stretching is because it's not getting enough light. There's only so much I can do about that, unfortunately: the greenhouse only gets what the sky gives it. Maybe when I finish my weather-control ray.

(There's a follow-up post, q.v.)