Sometime during the summer I spotted a Christmas cactus in our neighbour‘s garden. It was just lying there on the lawn without a pot, looking a bit worse for wear. I figured she had put it there to be rinsed off by the rain before she would repot it, and it had fallen over. I put it upright and forgot about it. A few days later, I saw it again, still in the same spot. “Don’t forget to repot your cactus”, I reminded her. “Oh, that old thing, that was meant to be on the compost”, she said.

Anyone who knows me knows what happened next. I marched back to the cactus (next to the compost, indeed), took it home and treated it to some fresh soil and a pot and put it out on our roof, where it got watered when it rained (other than during very hot weeks, I’ve found that benign neglect works wonders for a lot of plants).

A few weeks after taking the plants inside for the winter, I noticed lots of buds on my little foundling, and not too much later, it looked like this:

Not sure if there is a moral to the story. But I definitely recommend taking in stray plants and cats. You’ll be glad you did.