![]() ![]() OF COURSE, IT may be this very indifference that attracts us, makes us want to reject sleep and propriety and stay up all night (when all the most interesting things happen). All that is left to greet the waking is a twist of spent petals: You missed the party. The pageantry of flowering that for many plants arcs over days and weeks in spring and summer - what we read as resurrection, the earth coming back to life after a hard winter - is for the night bloom compressed into a single wanton evening. (The term “night-blooming cereus” encompasses a number of species of cactuses.) Nothing lasts. The American photographer Sally Mann deployed it as such in “Night Blooming Cereus,” a 1988 portrait of her daughter Jessie Mann, then age 7, posed with two bone white, half-wilted blossoms draped over her bare chest in an ominous bodice, the child’s feral freedom already giving way to the strictures and demands of womanhood. Its life is a matter of hours in the light of day, it retreats and shrivels, a ball gown turned to rags.įrom a human perspective, this is parable. Starting around dusk (depending on where in the world you are, how warm the day, the ponderousness of clouds), the pale, waxy buds, which resemble elongated artichokes, start to open, the pink-tipped sepals peeling back millimeter by millimeter until, by midnight, the secret is told: the blossom announcing itself, so white it seems to glow, with skinny yellow streamers at its throat. All year it sprawls, a spiked barricade - and then, one night, the flowers come. ![]() A climbing cactus native to Mexico and Central America but now thriving in regions tropical and temperate around the world, it can grow more than 30 feet tall, colonizing trees and rock walls with extended, fleshy stems, massed like the arms of an octopus. BY DAY, HYLOCEREUS undatus resists friendship.
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