Several years ago, I was at the Saturday Market on the Square when I bumped into some friends selling a table full of plants. For ten dollars, I bought a well-established Night-Blooming Cereus, also called a Queen of the Night. It has long, waxy leaves and blooms only at night.
My husband reacted with humor and raised his eyebrows a little at me, wondering if I’d lost my mind. A flower that blooms at night? Who wants to stay up all night to wait for a flower to bloom in the dark?
Me. I want to see them bloom, that’s who. And more than a few times now, I have watched the petals unfurl in the dark, opening to reveal a miraculous work of natural art. After spending a day in the early part of retirement repotting all my plants that needed some TLC, I was amazed to step out onto the front porch to see that one plant (I’ve propagated the mother plant several times over the years) had six blooms. Six!
If I were curating a list of porch plants and taking all my friends plant shopping for the plants they never knew they needed until today, this plant would be at the top of the list. It never gets old watching these beauties bloom to take center stage in a world that rarely sees them.
Queen of the Night
a queen of the night
unfurls her beautiful soul
for all to admire
Common Threads 