Night-blooming cereus must love rain because yesterday was rainy and humid and that is when the rest of our cereus plants bloomed. Fortunately, the rain stopped before we headed out around 9:30 PM to take pictures of the flowers. It was also 79 degrees F outside! We haven’t experienced temperatures below 80 degrees F for a few weeks.

I was hoping this particular night-blooming cereus plant would wait to bloom until today since I have an intervalometer coming in the mail for my Nikon D3300. An intervalometer will allow me to take time-lapse photos and turn them into a movie. Since this cereus bloomed last night though, I will have to wait until next year to try that with the night-blooming cereus. I do, however, plan on using the intervalometer to take a sunset time-lapse!

The night-blooming cereus at 7:30 PM yesterday. I hadn’t noticed before that the cereus have different base colors. This one seems to be green, while the cereus that bloomed last night is purple.

Josh is the best! He went out with me last year for 3 nights and then this year for 2 nights to hold the light up for me so I can take pictures.

Now, for some flower picspam!

This is the night-blooming cereus that had only one bloom the night before. You can see the wilted flower head in the bottom center of this picture. I’m glad the remaining two buds blossomed.

This cereus had four blossoms last year. Sadly, this year it must have experienced too much trauma (possibly from a critter or fallen tree branches) and had no buds. Josh says he will put some wire around it to protect it from further breakage.

This night-blooming cereus is so entangled with this (dead?) mesquite tree that it is very hard to tell which is the tree and which is the night-blooming cereus. This plant had only one blossom but it was a beauty.

There were a lot of bugs out while we tromping around in the outer yard, probably because of the rain. This millipede was roaming around at the base of a plant. Josh even had a palo verde beetle fly right into his chest because he was holding the light while we were walking. Josh said that was not a pleasant experience.

This night-blooming cereus is probably my favorite one in our yard. It is a little hard to find and grows right out of the base of a shriveled bush. When it’s not flowering, you wouldn’t even know it was there. I was excited when I saw that it had four buds. They certainly did not disappoint. The blossom at the top of the picture looks like a queen holding court.

So we only had two bloom nights this year but they were both spectacular! I wonder what surprises the queen of the night will bring us next year.

-Lynn