You're invited regularly visit my site to see our changing garden. Every time I take a walk through our families' garden, even if it is the second or third time on the same day, I notice something different. It might be a happy accident of nature or a newly blooming flower, a beautiful combination, a great fragrance. Walking through the garden and stopping to look is always an adventure full of surprises.

Visitors find it hard to believe we don't use chemical fertilizers, or pesticides. I do add compost to most gardens yearly, as nature intended.

Mushrooms

Summer Bounty

Nests & Birds

Garden Conservancy Open Days Garden Tour

Queen of the Night

One of the most beautiful floral events of the summer is the blooming of the Queen of the night (Epiphyllum oxypetalum), also commonly called night-blooming cereus, although it does not belong to the cereus family. When flower-clothed it is a most glorious sight: each fragrant flower is luminous and lovely, glistening white in the darkness, sweetly scenting the air with an exotic perfume with the depth, trail, and carry of paperwhites. But bloom is very short indeed - only one night a year. Naked the other 364 nights and all the days of the year, Queen of the Night is so homely only a mother could love it, lanky and long, all arms and legs. Its flattened leaflike stems are made of jointed segments and mostly sprawl and flop awkwardly in all directions. On my plant, one stem stands straight up, branching at the top into what might be described as the flattened finger of a hand. How it holds this pose outdoors in the summer garden, through rain and wind without support is a mystery. Of course I could lop it off. This wouldn't improve it's appearance much, but I could send the chopped-off segments to a gardening friend for propagation, which is how I got my own Queen; it is a plant to be shared.

As the bloom time approaches, (in this case a mere 18 days from start to finish) each day the buds puff up like slow-filling balloons until they're more than three inches fat and six inches long. (On a mature plant they can be bigger still - 6 inches by 9 inches.) As nine o'clock approaches on the night the Queen blooms, the buds begin opening a layer at a time, petticoats and flounces of petals emerging to surround the mouth of the flower. Inside each flower is the best show: an intricate pattern composed of dozens of stamens, capped with gold buttons, standing and saluting. Prominently shining in the middle is the stigma opening as a starburst. Our Queen graced us with one bloom this year on the evening of July 13th, filling the air with her exotic perfume.