Night-Blooming Cereus

Night-blooming cereus opens after dark and is finished by morning. A single flower gets one night, and it spends it wide open, huge and white and pouring out perfume.

It grows out of stone walls in the driest, most unlikely places — a sprawling cactus that looks like nothing at all for most of the year, then blooms by the hundreds on the same summer night.

People used to drive out just to see the walls in flower under the moon. A whole community showing up for something that would not last until sunrise.