Beauty is fleeting

A couple of years ago I posted a picture of a cactus blossom we had outside our family room. Our cactus patch usually produces one blossom at a time. And only a handful of them in a season.

This year was different.

Some years, we would have a bunch of buds start to form but only a few would develop. The rest would just fall off. This year there were a lot of buds and they all developed. They all bloomed almost at once.

Here's our little cactus patch with the flowers starting to open on Tuesday evening.

Here they are about an hour later.

And here they are yesterday morning.

Here's a close-up of the show at the top of the tall cactuses.

These flowers last a day then collapse. I was going to show the pictures of the aftermath yesterday evening but I had to wait till tonight. A second batch of flowers opened last night.

Here you get to see the first day's flowers starting to droop alongside the flowers that are starting to open.

The top clump, some closing and some opening.

Here we see this morning's new flowers with yesterday's finished flowers.

And tonight the show's over.

We've never had a show like this one. It was pretty while it lasted.

(There are a few buds that will open in a few days but we won't have such an opulent show again this year.)