Week 3Fall Week 3
Virgie looked at the naked, luminous, complicated flower, large and pale as a face on the dark porch. For a moment she felt more afraid than she had coming to the door.
—Eudora Welty, “The Wanderers”
For decades, my grandmother was the caretaker of a gangly, disorganized houseplant with nothing, so far as I could see, to recommend it. The plant was ugly, an awkward tangle of greenery fashioned from what seemed to be spare botanical parts: long stems that reached out in a vaguely threatening way and generated new stems, randomly, from within their own stretching expanses. Some of the stems were round and some were flat and some were almost serrated, and there were no leaves at all. It was less a plant than something out of a nightmare. As a little girl, I thought it might bite me.
In warm months, the plant stayed on the front porch of that equally gangly, equally disorganized old farmhouse, a dogtrot structure that had been added onto willy-nilly over the years. When the evenings began to cool in early autumn, my grandmother would bring the plant indoors, set it on a table next to the fireplace, and wait hopefully for it to bloom. She called it her “night-blooming series.”
It was years before I understood that the scary plant in my grandparents’ house was actually a night-blooming cereus, a catchall term for several varieties of cactus that bloom at night, often for only one night each year. That’s if they bloom: my grandmother’s “series” apparently bloomed just once in all the decades she had it. There are two pictures of it in full flower, and they were both taken on the same night sometime during the 1960s.
I have no idea how my grandmother, a teacher in a two-room schoolhouse tucked among peanut fields in Lower Alabama, came to be in possession of such an exotic plant, but I understand her attachment to it, despite its annual failure to produce a bud. My own night-blooming cereus has so far proved to be a non-blooming cereus, too. All it grows are ridiculous appendages. One stem is ninety-two inches long and still going.
This variety of cereus is a pass-along plant, easily shared via rooted cuttings. My cutting came from my brother and sister-in-law’s plant, a proven bloomer, and I protect it ferociously. As much as I welcome the obscure bird grasshopper that has taken up residence in our yard, I carefully removed it from the cereus, returned it to the pollinator garden, and then zipped the entire plant into a butterfly cage to protect it from future grasshopper incursions.
One year Billy texted a photo of a bud on his plant. “It might bloom tonight!” he wrote. “I looked in my garden journal, and it was fully open by 8:00 p.m. in 2014.”
My brother’s garden journal is a force of nature in its own right, a combination of art and field notes that he adds to as time permits and observations require. The years are layered one upon another—notes from a specific date in one year sharing the same space with notes from the same date a decade earlier—in an abundant approximation of the way the garden itself experiences time. Billy is a careful chronicler of his exquisite garden, and I had full faith in his best guess about the time his cereus would bloom.
I shot Haywood a text about where I was going, got in the car, and drove straight to Clarksville, more than fifty miles away. I stopped only for gas. With a night-blooming cereus, the transformation from bud to blossom can take less than an hour.
Driving west into the sunset, I squinted against the glare the whole way, but I could see well enough to note how dry the trees along the highway were—dry and covered with dust. The fall wildflowers had yet to appear. Believe me, I recognized the irony. There I was, driving through a climate-parched landscape with a full tank of gas, on a pilgrimage to do nothing more than watch a flower bloom. The hot winds from the eighteen-wheelers shook my whole car as they passed.
I am only one generation removed from the farm, and I spent much of my childhood in the world where my mother grew up: the same one where my grandmother grew up, and my great-grandmother before her, going back further than anyone can remember. For weeks of every year, I slept in the bed my mother slept in as a child; I walked barefoot down the same red-dirt roads she walked down barefoot; I ate the plums that grew beside her childhood porch, at least until they fermented in the hot Alabama sun and made the red wasps drunk on their wine.
Today only 2 percent of Americans live on farms or ranches, but we have not lost our need to be among green things. Which may explain my brother’s impulse to keep a garden journal, and my own impulse to write about the life of my wild yard. It may explain why many friends and neighbors were already gathered in my brother and sister-in-law’s living room by the time I got to Clarksville that evening, all of them waiting for the miraculous event to unfold.
The bud of a night-blooming cereus is a feat of botanical magic, big enough to span the full length of a human hand. This one was in no hurry to open. Pink filaments still ribbed it tightly from stem to tip an hour after I arrived. “It’s like counting contractions, waiting for a baby to be born,” someone said.
Then, finally, an aperture began to open at the very end. The pink filaments began to loosen and lift. As the aperture widened, a star-shaped structure unfolded within it—a white star inside a white flower—and the translucent petals unlayered and arrayed themselves around the star. The flower was nine inches across fully opened, and its perfume filled the whole room with sweetness.
It was not a nightmare plant. It was the flower of dreams.
It was just one flower on just one ordinary day in September. It would be gone by morning, not to return for another year. Its arrival did nothing to mitigate the drought gripping the land. It did nothing to feed a native pollinator or shelter a tree frog. You could insist that it didn’t matter in any way, and I would not think to argue with you.
But it was also not nothing. That night-blooming cereus brought my grandmother back to me in her halo of white hair. It brought back, too, her plum tree, long since cut down, and the feeling of red dirt between my toes. For an hour, just this once, it made me remember what it feels like when the world is exactly as it must be, and I am exactly where I belong.