Instead of updating the blog with some of my program notes, of which I have a huge backlog, I feel like celebrating the fact that (a) we have electricity for the third night in a row, which is still heavenly after three nights without it and (b) we had four blooms open tonight on the night-blooming cereus. We had a few more last week, and I don’t want to get jaded. They really are the most extraordinary flowers. I hope they draw all sorts of exotic moths, bats, and nightbirds to our patio, even if I never see them with my own myopic old night-blind eyeballs. Do your thing, furtive nocturnal pollinators, and know that I love you!

Before I hit you with the night-blooming cereus shots, though, I’m going to throw in a funny one I took of the passionflower vine, which is doing quite well on our back decks. It’s a native (Passiflora incarnata), and I hope it comes back abundantly, even though the fragrance is disappointingly salami-like. The important thing is that it attracts and feeds a variety of interesting moths, so I suppose it smells the way it needs to smell to perpetuate itself. (As for me, I’ll stick to Chanel Misia for now.) I’d probably grow the Passiflora incarnata even if it smelled totally rancid, like a corpseflower, which it does not, thank goodness. I like the way it looks. It reminds me of Phyllis Diller. This lil maypop doesn’t take itself too seriously!