Sweet Maid of Night: Night-Blooming Cereus
The Night-Blooming Cereus as depicted in Robert Thornton’s Temple of Flora (1800)
Refulgent Cerea! - at the dusky hour
She seeks with pensive step the mountain-bower,
Bright as the blush of rising morn, and warms
The dull cold eye of Midnight with her charms.
There to the skies she lifts her pencill’d brows,
Opes her fair lips, and breathes her virgin vows;
Eyes the white zenyth; counts the suns, that roll
Their distant fires, and blaze around the Pole;
Or marks where Jove directs his glittering car
O’er Heaven’s blue vault, –Herself a brighter star.
–There as soft zephyrs sweep with pausing airs
Thy snowy neck, and part thy shadowy hairs,
Sweet Maid of Night! to Cynthia’s sober beams
Glows thy warm cheek, thy polish’d bosom gleams.
- From The Botanic Garden (Part 2: The Loves of the Plants), a poem by Erasmus Darwin, 1791
For centuries, we have been enchanted by the concept of a flower that only blooms at night – especially when it takes a lot of patience to get it there. But the night-blooming cereus is worth the wait.
Technically, there are a number of plants that we refer to as “night-blooming cereus,” but that moniker covers the basic qualifications of the name; they are flowering cacti (cereus is a genus of the cacti family) that bloom exclusively at night. They are tropical plants, so not native to our cold Midwest climate. You can see a list of types here. At Ruthmere, we have long been the caretakers of one such plant: the Epiphyllum oxypetalum, which also goes by “the Dutchman’s pipe cactus,” “princess of the night,” or “queen of the night.” I’m not sure exactly when we received the plant or who gave it to us (its presence here precedes my own). When I first started working here, I was told that it had never bloomed.
Night-Blooming Cereus in Bloom - source
That, from what I’ve gathered, is typical of a night-blooming cereus. It can take years for even a single bloom to grow. Perhaps that is why they have historically been romanticized and poeticized, oft compared to a lovely lady making her shy, delicate appearance only after nightfall. Erasmus Darwin’s poem, The Botanic Garden, is a prime example of this, using sexualized, anthropomorphizing language to illustrate parallels between humanity and plants. His hope was that this would make readers more interested in science and botany, educating them and entertaining them at the same time. Darwin (like his grandson, Charles Darwin) was a naturalist. He planted the seeds, so to speak, for the theory of evolution that his grandson would expand upon later in the 19th century.
With such an elusive bloom, you can surely understand why we were all so excited when our Campus Gardener, Bree, showed us just how much the plant had prospered under her care.
Night-Blooming Cereus in the Ruthmere Greenhouse
I can count roughly 27 blooms in that picture alone.
Bree is an expert on the plant by now, having seen it bloom multiple times in the past – she knew that it was ready. If you own one of these plants, you become very adept at reading her moods (“her” being the plant, my homage to Erasmus). They usually bloom annually in the springtime, but according to Bree, ours has been blooming in the fall, too. It just recently happened on a night in May while we were all relaxing or sleeping at home; tragically, none of us were able to stake out in the greenhouse overnight and wait for the show. I imagine it would have been a fireworks display of flowerage, white petals bursting to reflect heavenly moonlight in the greenhouse’s humid, cozy slice of jungle. Apologies for the flowery language.
Night-Blooming Cereus buds in Ruthmere’s Greenhouse - a plucked chicken’s neck? I think they’re rather beautiful.
Such a pastime is a southern tradition. In the South, these flowers receive their very own welcoming “Bloom Parties” as families and neighbors gather in hospitality to watch in awe as the blooms unfold. I found a fantastic contemporary description of these parties in this article from the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden in Richmond, Virginia. Volunteer Mabel Baldwin recounts the preparations her family made to prepare for these parties. I particularly loved this description: “I would wonder how this ugly bud, which reminded me of a plucked chicken’s neck, would become the spectacular flower that I remembered from the previous year…”
Eudora Welty (1930s) from the Eudora Welty Foundation.
A crucial proponent of the Bloom Party was novelist Eudora Welty (1909-2001). In the 1930s, she and her friends formed the “Night-Blooming Cereus Club” with the very fitting motto: “Don’t take it cereus, life’s too mysterious.” Bloom Parties were announced in the local newspapers in Jackson, Mississippi, bringing diversion, socialization, and merriment to those suffering through the long years of the Great Depression. Welty and her friends attended bearing matches to light up the darkness so that they could witness the blooms alongside their neighbors. Later, they conveyed the beauty and excitement of the experience through letters to one another, recounting the fine details. Welty also made references to these plants in her writing, such as in her short story, “The Wanderers,” and her novel, Losing Battles. Her name has become nearly synonymous with the night-blooming cereus and Bloom Parties. You can learn more about her life, her home (a National Historic Landmark on the National Register of Historic Places), and her garden here.
Perhaps we will be able to hold a Bloom Party at Ruthmere in the future. The next bloom should be in the fall! What do you think – would you attend? In the meantime, I’ve read that they are fairly easy to cultivate, even if it takes a while to grow flowers. However, one source noted that your night-blooming cereus could bloom as early as one year from planting if you grow it from a mature cutting. Who knows – maybe you’ll be hosting a Bloom Party of your own before you know it.
