Views of the porch...

Sometime during the 1980's my sister visited a school fate and returned with a small cactus, it lived in the recently built greenhouse where it prospered so well it started to produce offshoots - which we cut off and replanted (our first cuttings) - when my sister and I left home the cacti were left with my Dad, who repotted them several times, watered them, looked after them and probably spoke to them on several occasions.
Now the catci live in our porch in Abingdon and this year they produced these remarkable flowers:.
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Although stunning, the flowers only last for 24 hours before withering.
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But thanks to the twitter feed of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (https://twitter.com/morethanadodo) it has finally been identified as Echinopsis eyrieslli - a native of South America, where it is also known as, rather appropriately, the hedgehog cactus.