(Last year, because of the pandemic, the event was streamed online, and a single plant’s blooming was commemorated in a time-lapse video.) Once buds appear, they’re carefully measured until they’re swollen enough - when they hit 120 millimeters, the countdown begins - to proclaim bloom night, when the public is welcomed to wander low-lit trails and spy on the flowers-to-be. These days, at the Tohono Chul botanical garden in Tucson, Ariz., grounds staff monitor the nation’s largest private collection of Peniocereus greggii, another night-blooming cactus that is known as queen of the night, although it spends much of its life resembling nothing more than dead twigs. Often the manifestation had the quality of a miracle: In “ The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration” (2010), the writer Isabel Wilkerson recalls how, “once a year on a midsummer night that could not be foretold,” her grandmother would invite neighbors over to her porch in Rome, Ga., to sip sweet tea and eat ice cream until the cereus flowers yawned wide and everyone leaned in, hoping to see “the baby Jesus in the cradle in the folds.”
Life’s too mysterious” - keeping in mind how quickly the voluptuous flower dwindled into “a wrung chicken’s neck,” as one Jackson local put it. The Southern writer Eudora Welty, then in her 20s, attended such gatherings in Jackson, Miss., and even started the Night-Blooming Cereus Club, with the motto “Don’t take it cereus. During the hardscrabble years of the Great Depression, people held vigils for the coming of the flowers, taking out notices in newspapers to proclaim that blooming in their backyards was imminent, should anyone care to swing by after nightfall. 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).
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