Update: It’s Bloom Night at Tohono Chul and they are livestreaming the flowers opening! You can watch it here. I think only one of our cereus will be blooming tonight but I will be sure to post pictures as soon as I can take a picture of one flower fully open. Warning: I may be posting as late as midnight tonight!
I mentioned the night-blooming cereus cactus in one of our This Week on the Homestead posts. I am not a flower or cactus expert, so I am not sure what I am looking for in predicting when ours will bloom. There are different varieties of night-blooming cereus but I think our particular ones are Peniocereus greggii. The flowers bloom for one night in June or July starting around 8 PM and then close by dawn the next day.
Today I decided to go take a look at all the known locations of night-blooming cereus on our property and take pictures of their flower buds. I feel like they might flower soon, but hopefully, we will have some warning when they do!
To get help with the bloom night prediction, I joined the bloom night newsletter at Tohono Chul. It’s possible that our bloom night will be the same as theirs.
This night-blooming cereus is probably the closest one to the house and is in an area that we check all the time, by the chicken coop. I’m hoping that this can be our “signaling” cactus to know when the others are blooming. This one seems like it could bloom sooner than the others… but maybe it will wait.
The former owners of this property left us a map of the known locations of these cacti. I had found only two of them, but I finally found this third one! This one is pretty easy to get to also.
The view of the house from the third night-blooming cereus’s location
This is the second night-blooming cereus and it has 3 flower buds. Hopefully, they will all bloom.
This is the fourth night-blooming cereus and has 4 flower buds. There is also another one close by but it is practically wrapped around a mesquite trunk so I wasn’t able to take a good picture of it. That fifth one has 2 flower buds.
Stay tuned! I will probably continue to take pictures of their progress until we hit bloom night.
-Lynn
This post is the first part of a series. You can read the three other posts here:
Night-blooming Cereus: First Bloom