PEOPLE walking past Maurice Dale's home at Pickering have been doing a double-take - admiring his gigantic Christmas-flowering cacti.

With a circumference of 7ft 6in and 2ft 8in in diameter the specimen is seen as a unique example - but Maurice has no real secret for its success.

He has owned it for some seven years after it was given to him by his mother.

"She had had it for many years but when she passed it on to me I re-potted it from a plastic container into a terracota pot and it just grew and grew," said Maurice, a gardener, driver and handyman at the North Yorkshire County Council old people's homes at Whitby Road, Pickering.

Each spring he puts it out in the garden at his home in Cuddy Brown Close and takes it back indoors at the first sign of a frost in the autumn.

"I give it just one feed of fertiliser a year and an occasional water but otherwise it looks after itself," said Maurice.

He added: "It has had many admirers and this year it has been particularly good with hundreds of blooms which last all over Christmas and well into the New Year."

Updated: 10:04 Thursday, December 27, 2001