Circadian Nocturne

One of the first things I discovered is that there is no definitive list of night-blooming flowers. It isn't considered important enough to compile. I found this both strange and characteristic — these are plants that have developed an entire evolutionary strategy around darkness and lunar light, and it hasn't been felt to be important enough to note. I pieced the list together over months, through research, through conversations with botanists, and by growing some of the flowers myself in my garden so I could photograph them properly. 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 — to look, in the dark, as much like the moon as possible. I find this extraordinary. The flower is doing something genuinely cosmological in its own small way. The original Times Square presentation was designed so that the flowers became enormous — human scale collapsed to something closer to an insect looking up at a petal. I wanted people to feel small in the way you feel small looking at the night sky. Not frightened, but located. Reminded of your actual size in things. 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. I love that this exists. It is one of the most purely attentive things people do.