Circadian Nocturne

One of the first things I discovered is that there is no definitive list of night-blooming flowers as it hasn't been considered important enough to compile in any kind of systematic way (probably because there has been no economic value in doing so). But these are plants that have developed an entire evolutionary strategy around darkness and lunar light. I pieced a list together through conversations with botanists and scientists and by growing some of the flowers myself in my garden. Night-blooming flowers are almost always white. They need to be visible to the moths and beetles that pollinate them, which means they evolved to catch and reflect moonlight and to look, in the dark, as much like the moon as possible — so that the flower is doing something sort of cosmological in its own very small way. The original Times Square presentation was designed so that the flowers became enormous and that the human scale collapsed to something closer to an insect. There is a tradition of watch parties around night-blooming flowers — people gathering, sometimes in the hundreds, to wait through the night for a flower that will only be open for a few hours — which is something that I wanted to echo with the Times Square presentation which was only shown for three minutes at midnight.