Australian House & Garden

Queen of the Night

It’s a rather undistinguished looking climbing cactus from South America but it has one of the strangest and most beautiful flowers known. Its common name is Queen of the Night although another lesser plant, the heavily scented Cestrum nocturnum, shares that same popular appellation.

The Queen of the Night that genuinely deserves the name is Selenicereus grandiflorus. At the very tail end of summer it does its spectacular thing, producing huge white flowers the size of dinner plates that glow almost incandescent by moonlight and emit the most intoxicating fragrance when fully open.

The flowers sprout from the long lozenge-shaped leaves that have a kind of scalloped edge, emerging first as a reddish-brown bubble that is then quickly transformed into a slender pendulous stalk about 20 cms long terminating in a ribbed tear-shaped bud. Over a period of a few days this bud swells until it is approximately the size of a large fig. When ready, as soon as the sun sets, the nondescript bud bursts into sensational bloom, concentric cupped circles of white petals arranged inside a circle of yellow threads. It’s rather like a ballerina’s tutu viewed from below.

Its scent -vanilla with hints of orange-flower - is unforgettable. The bad news is that this amazing show, a kind of gala performance, lasts for just one night only. The flower opens as soon as the sun sets and is spent by morning, the glorious flower collapsed leaving only a sad looking moist vegetative mess resembling a wet tassel.

This amazing specimen has been known for centuries. In 1799, in what must rank as one of the most romantic gestures of all time, an Englishman, one Dr Robert John Thornton, upon inheriting a fortune, abandoned his medical practice and devoted the rest of his days to the study of plants, commissioned the one of the most beautiful botanical publications ever devised, a lavish portfolio called Temple of Flora. Plate number 14 is of Selenicereus grandiflorus, described as the ‘Night Blowing Cereus.’ Given this long awareness, it’s surprising that it isn’t more widely grown. But occasionally, when driving around the outer suburbs of Sydney and other cities with the requisite conditions, one sees it rampaging over a garage or clambering up a fifteen metre high palm, and for three hundred and fifty five days of the year you'd hardly give it a glance. Both on that night of night when it bursts forth with, in the case of older plants, literally hundred of flowers it’s worth taking out a folding chair and sitting quietly inhaling the scented and witnessing one of nature’s miracles.

• Posted By: Leo at Large at 3.07PM

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