The Beauty of Night-Blooming Flowers

Plants that unfurl their petals only in darkness are like poetry in blossom

- Ligaya Mishan

BY DAY, HYLOCEREUS UNDATUS resists friendship. A climbing cactus native to Mexico and Central America but now thriving in tropical and temperate regions around the world, it can grow to 10 metres tall, colonizing trees and rock walls with extended, fleshy stems, massed like the arms of an octopus. All year it sprawls, a spiked barricade-and then, one night, the flowers come.

Starting around dusk (depending on where in the world you are, how warm the day is, the ponderousness of clouds), the pale, waxy buds, which resemble elongated artichokes, start to open, the pink-tipped sepals peeling back millimetre by millimetre until, by midnight, the secret is told: the blossom announcing itself, so white it seems to glow, with skinny yellow streamers at its throat. Its lifespan is a matter of hours; in the light of day, it retreats and shrivels, a ball gown turned to rags.

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. All that is left to greet the waking is a twist of spent petals: You missed the party.