meet Stapelia, my most favorite plant

I've been fighting the suspicion that fall is sneakily nudging the warm days of summer out of the air. I love fall. It's by far my favorite season, which is why we're getting married in October. It's just that I'm not really ready to give up on warm nights requiring no sweater. But then again I'm giddy with the subtle change in the light, with the hard squashes piling up at the farmer's market, with that tiny chill that settles over our bed in the early morning.

And of course with the blooming of the coolest succulent on my front porch.



I snipped a little clipping of this guy from a planter in front of a DWP building in Marina Del Rey years ago. I couldn't live without these wild flowers and I decided no one in the public works department would notice a tiny sprig gone missing. The plant part of the Stapelia Gigantea is nothing special, just a regular cactus-y looking thing, but the flowers are bigger than my hand and feel strangely like rubbery flesh. AND they apparently smell like rotting meat in order to attract flies for pollination, but I've never noticed a thing... except for the flies. That part really works.

Isn't it so cool?