I neglected to update my blog last week, even though I made a mental note that I could, say, celebrate the birthday of Richard Strauss (June 11) by posting a bunch of annotations from my vast backlog of notes that have been published but not online.
In my defense, I have been busy writing marketing client for a new client, one I value enormously and would like to retain, and I have also been doing other things, like studying French again on the free Mango app (free with my St. Louis Public Library card anyway–such a fantastic deal!), and reading books (I highly recommend the new Megan Abbott novel, Beware the Woman), learning to recognize the birdsong of various species in my backyard with the Merlin app, tending to our menagerie of geriatric companion animals (three cats in their mid to late teens, one dog who is estimated to be about 12), and, most relevant to this post, enjoying our small but fertile and fragrant garden.
Our night-blooming cereus is a reliable bloomer in the late spring and throughout the summer. Really, as soon as we put it outside on the patio, after its winter sabbatical indoors, which it seems to resent mightily, a sulking, drooping, morose succulent deprived of the only thing it really seems to care about, being outdoors. My mother-in-law was given this plant in the early ’80s, I believe, but the plant was already mature when she got it. She used to keep it on their brick patio on Westminster, but when they moved, they didn’t want to deal with it anymore (it’s extremely large and cumbersome and, if I’m being perfectly honest, not at all beautiful aside from the blooms, which last only one night and keep their own unpredictable blooming schedules).
That said, it’s hard to imagine a blossom more beautiful. Some people call it Queen of the Night, which I like because it reminds me of the famous Mozart aria, from The Magic Flute, but I haven’t adopted the nickname myself because night-blooming cereus is what I have known it, since I first encountered it on my in-laws’ patio back in the mid-90s.
I could include a lot more information about the n-b c, as my husband and I have taken to calling it, but instead I will just let you look at the photos. The petals remind me of swan feathers, elegantly curved and impossibly delicate. There’s that weird little sculptural stamen, like one of those Louise Bourgeois spiders, only small and pale. The bud, before it opens, looks like a frightening David Cronenberg creature, perhaps something out of eXistenZ. When more than two blossoms are opening at once–we had three on the night of June 14–the fragrance is almost overpowering. Imagine a gardenia on steroids. There’s a strong lemony floral top note, so dominant that it almost smells acrid, like mass-market kitchen cleaners, but this gradually fades to a much more pleasant, almost creamy classic white-petal scent.
By sunrise, the blossoms are spent and sad, resembling nothing so much as a used condom you might see on the street.
More classical music content coming soon, I promise.
René Spencer Saller 