My maternal grandmother’s sister gave this cactus to her in the mid 1930s. My grandmother gave this cactus to me in 1981. It has moved with us from Michigan to Atlanta to New York back to Georgia and now to Florida. I have pruned and propagated it many times to share its beauty. I used to call it my Christmas cactus, but now I have a different species that blooms at Christmas and this one blooms later, so I have renamed it my New Year’s cactus. This is the first bloom of the season. Rather than a side view, I decided to make the photos lying on my back looking up towards the sun to see inside and through the petals. I played with the backgrounds to give it a variety of moods.
Looking up to the sun
A bluer cast
A darker background
An imaginary background
Blurring the green leaves
Into the center with a dark background
Into the center with an imagined background