Help, my cactus is on fire!

Standard Reporter12 April 2012

A man's conservatory caught on fire after a cactus exploded into flames.

The 10-inch specimen caught fire when the sun turned Paul Henson's conservatory into an oven. The flames spread to other plants and started licking the conservatory roof before firemen arrived.

Today, Mr Henson, 28, from Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, said: "I never thought one of my plants would explode."

He said he smelt something burning. "I thought the kids had been fooling around with matches which is bad enough, but when I saw what had actually happened, I was speechless.

"It was lucky that someone was at home at the time or it could have been more serious." Mr Henson had recently moved the cactus, which is a native of Chile, from his bedroom to the conservatory.

"I wanted it to be more exposed to the light," he said. Similar cactus plants have been known to combust in the blazing Chilean desert.

Mark Evans, from the Raymonds Cactus Centre in Essex, said he had never heard of a plant exploding in a home before. "It is not normal for it to happen in the house variety."

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