Moon Gardens Blooming
The mountain growing season is short, and autumn is already tossing yellow-and-red confetti. It slaps against my windshield as I drive backroads to reach my friend Amy’s homestead, circa 1892. Curve after curve, I find locust trees that are a few shades lighter than they were last week. Buckeyes also seem well on their way to change. It is, already, hard to tell the difference between orange leaves falling and monarch butterfly wings rising. The signs of summer and fall, all intertwining.
Amy, a hobbyist flower farmer, has invited me over for a one-on-one garden party during this early fall week. Tonight, we’re determined to stake out night-blooming flowers so that we might see them open in real time. To some people, this might have the thrill of watching grass grow, but we’ve been looking forward to it for weeks.
Our admittedly quirky plan can be traced back to a conversation that happened months ago, when I told Amy that the University of Cambridge had livestreamed the nocturnal blooming of a moonflower. There are many species called “moonflower.” The one broadcast from the Cambridge greenhouse was an imported cactus.
People gathered around screens to watch that Amazonian flower bloom in a European greenhouse, in a petal explosion that lasted till daybreak. It was heralded as a special occurrence. And once I heard about it, I could not stop wondering what it might be like to watch a flower rise to greet the moon rather than the sun—only in person.
Amy—the kind of woman who spins yarn from the wool of her own sheep and grinds wheat berries to bake her own bread—suggested that, while she found the public interest in that cactus flower heartening, she was wary of people gathering around blue-lit screens to witness an organic happening. “There’s an entire night-blooming world out there,” she told me, in commentary that inspired her to have a personal epiphany. Because even though she has dedicated much of her life to tending flowers, she’s never pointedly set out to observe their nocturnal behaviors.
Just as butterflies have whole sun-blooming landscapes, moths have whole moon-blooming ones. I’d been introduced to the concept at Mothapalooza, but news reports of the Cambridge bloom made me start thinking about it anew. As Amy suggested, near each computer screen that had transmitted the image of that flower, at points around the globe, there were likely a variety of species revealing their own nocturnal beauty, unappreciated.
Moon gardens—with plants curated to be enjoyed after sunset—are designed with night bloomers and silver-and-white foliage meant to catch moonlight and ooze perfume. Many chosen species don’t bloom just once a year, but every evening, for as long as the flowering season lasts. They apparently enjoyed a surge of interest during the pandemic, when people were stuck at home, searching for nightly entertainment.
Historically, moon gardens gained traction in Victorian times, when households were beginning to transition from candles and lanterns to electricity. In that era, darkness was not the other; it was endless light that was foreign. And if those long-ago moon gardens were a way of exploring people’s growing relationship with light, how might modern ones stand to deepen our relationship with disappearing darkness? It’s the kind of thing Amy and I couldn’t stop wondering about once we got started.
One of the best-known moon gardens in the United States is, ironically, located outside of Thomas Edison’s laboratory in Florida, where the scent of his cigars is said to have often mingled with the perfume of gardenias. Edison drew inspiration from that garden, cultivated in partnership with darkness. Yet we have become so acclimated to the electric world that he helped build, we have forgotten the value of the one it replaced.
This evening’s flower-watching might seem eccentric in the electrified era, but it’s a practice that’s occurred throughout history, across cultures. In general, though, if you’re not a gardener or regular night walker with an interest in botany, finding nocturnal bloomers can be difficult.
Almost as soon as I heard the term “moon garden” I started putting out the word to see if anyone I knew had one, becoming particularly romanced by the idea of tropical moonflowers, large ones like Cereus and Ipomoea alba, which resemble the morning glories that once grew feral along the edges of my grandfather’s tar paper barn. Then, one day, I unexpectedly heard from Amy, who, after our initial conversation, realized she’d sown some night bloomers that were maturing.
She’d been drawn to the ornamental tobacco genus Nicotiana not because of its nocturnal status but because she had identified it as a collection of plants that would have traditionally been grown on her Appalachian homestead. It was only after contemplating that live-broadcast bloom that she’d started thinking of watching flowers minute by minute as a potential recreational activity. Now she’s romanced to think that it’s something the original inhabitants of her home, known as Honeysuckle House, might have participated in.
Amy lives, in part, like a historic reenactor, pursuing house projects and activities that align with her home’s original timeline. She would hesitate to describe herself as such, but it isn’t just anyone who mows their yard with an antique scythe, storing it in the corner of a room known as the parlor. She has, since I’ve told her about this revived Victorian trend, come to realize that her historically accurate plantings have led her to create a haven of almost-lost nocturnal pleasures without realizing it—simply by tracing the inspiration of generations who lived prior to electrification.
Still, Amy wasn’t convinced she had anything special to offer after dark—until she spotted her first hawk moth. I’d told her that tobacco species are, as night bloomers, often frequented by hummingbird-like creatures that coevolved with Nicotiana and other night bloomers like primrose, the shape of the moth’s proboscis tongue almost an exact match for their tubular flowers. As soon as she learned about hawk moths, she started going into her garden at night to look for them, and immediately, one showed up.
The encounter, nothing more than a fleeting glimpse, was so moving that she nearly cried. Reflecting on the emotionality of her response, she said, “I didn’t even know hawk moths existed until you told me. Then, when I went looking, I found them, right there in my garden. I still can’t believe it.”
I get it. I have, for several seasons, been living it. Is there anything more moving than awaking to wonders that you have been wandering among all your life unaware? Is there anything more hopeful than realizing that you’ve always been surrounded by sublime scenes, even when you were living through days and weeks and months full of despair? Once you’ve brushed against night’s magic, it’s hard not to yearn for more of the shimmering life that seems to reside in all the darkest places.
As soon as the moth convinced Amy that she had nocturnal bounty to share, she called me over for this mini moonflower party. We’ve heard that, if you catch Nicotiana at just the right time, it’s like watching a time-lapse video—only with three-dimensional senses. Given the small seasonal window, we’ve made a pact to stake out these flowers for as long as it takes to bear witness.
When I arrive at Amy’s gingerbread-trim Queen Anne Victorian, she isn’t basking in the glory of her gardens, she’s gazing into the walnut trees that stand watch over her night bloomers. “Vultures,” she says, without diverting her gaze, which is sharpened by eyeglasses round and wide as Mason jar rims.
I see one, then two, then a whole committee of vultures staring down from a crooked branch. “They’ve been here for a while. We’re going to need to go check on the sheep.” This is not the flower-full experience I was expecting. But, inspired by my own adventures with laying hens, I’ve long stated: If you don’t have enough drama in your life, get some livestock.
I slide on the borrowed muck boots she offers, and we orbit a constellation of outbuildings to reach the pasture. Past a whitewashed chicken coop. Past the clapboard apple house where fruit was once stored through winter. Past the spring house, where drinking water was scooped from a trough prior to indoor plumbing. All the while, at least five vultures are watching us.
I’m trying not to take it as a terrible omen that they are perched directly above Amy’s kitchen garden, where the night-blooming tobacco is growing. We were set to look for signs of life. Now we’re faced with the very real possibility of finding a carcass. It’s an ill-matched introduction to flower-watching. At least, that’s what we’re thinking as we climb into her paddock, where scavengers are circling.
She lifts a creaking cattle gate, and we climb the pasture’s highest elevations. During this golden hour, the rolling hills are resplendent as a crown, with a mountain valley blushing pink underneath. It is the view held all day every day by her flock of Scottish Shetland sheep, bred to thrive in harsh conditions that mirror those of our home. When we crest the top hill, woolen heads raise to register our presence before going back to grazing.
“Looks like they’re all okay,” Amy says before turning her eyes skyward, where birds are still circling. They’re so large and the sun is so bright that their bodies cast shadows like art mobiles drawing circles on the hilltop, over and around us. I turn my eyes to the ground, and I watch their shadows slip across pasture grass. This is as close as I’ve ever been to a churning vulture kettle.
There must be a reason the scavengers are here. But Amy’s worried tone has mellowed. Now that she’s counted her sheep among the living, she’s convinced that it isn’t death the vultures are seeking. “It’s cattle birthing season,” she says, nodding toward a line of barbwire that marks her neighbor’s pasture, full of first-calf heifers. “I’m thinking that the vultures must be here for cattle afterbirth.”
Death isn’t always bloody, but mammalian birth is without fail. The nutrients of those mothers’ dark-womb placentas are, by the calves that they supported, no longer needed. But they can still nourish the community of life at large. The vultures are likely here to turn the remains of those domestic births into energy that might support their own wild offspring.
Vultures are famed symbols of darkness and death. But today, their presence is heralding new life. It’s a stunning realization to have, standing on this mountain bald, with vultures closing in. We came fearing a funeral, and we found a birthday celebration instead, on this, the very evening that we’ve decided to watch flowers—thought of as only blooming in alignment with sunlight—come to life in darkness.
On our way down the mountain, Amy’s sheep bleat a serenade that carries us through beds of cotton-ball hydrangea and swaths of color that she will soon sell via a local farm cooperative. When we reach the kitchen garden, we pull chairs across flagstone so that we might sit face-to-face with tobacco plants. Above, the vultures keep watch. They are still a bit eerie, but—given our strange realization about them as life-affirming creatures—I’m starting to appreciate their company.
Amy’s garden includes a variety of Nicotiana. Some bloom in daylight; others at night. The day bloomers are already in full form. They include woodland tobacco, Nicotiana sylvestris, which is bursting forth with white flowers, sprays of living star showers. Their blooms are hanging so low it looks as though they’re streaking white light across green stalks.
She has laid planks of weathered wood down to help her reach the far end of her beds, where various species are growing along fieldstone bulkheads. Of particular interest is jasmine tobacco, Nicotiana alata, with tight green stalks. These are the night bloomers we’ve pledged to watch.
As we wait out sunset, Amy decides to introduce me to her population of tobacco hornworms. She puts her hand under a leaf covered in nibble marks to reveal a green marshmallow. “When I saw the moth, I knew that caterpillars were around, and, sure enough, I immediately found this guy.”
The creature’s soft body has a sharp red tail that points up like a horn. I lift a leaf to study the caterpillar and gain sticky residue on my hands. If tobacco is harvested without gloves, it can create sickness from absorbed nicotine, a gluey mess on skin.
Amy directs me to smell the tops of flowers, then the bottoms. “It’s weird, how different it is,” she says. The petals have a sweet, delectable scent. But the stem smells distinctly of cigarettes. After a few extra sniffs, it takes on the heavy musk of leaf-rolled cigars, and I cannot help but muse that all those historic reports about Edison in his garden might have referenced the smell of some tobacco growing, not just the dead, dry leaves he was smoking.
It is, for me, a shock to view tobacco as a living being rather than a packaged product. North Carolina is so closely associated with growing tobacco that once, as a child in the 1980s, I was taken to a cigarette factory on a field trip, where whole packs of Camel Lights were given out as souvenirs. I was, maybe, twelve. Though it is nearly a bygone crop now, I have memories of burley tobacco growing around Watauga County, where it was long harvested and gathered in field bundles that looked, from a distance, like tents. Part of my current house is a reclaimed tobacco barn, salvaged for lumber. Some of our rafters are primitive tobacco drying rods, straight branches with bark still on them.
When Amy’s tobacco first bloomed, she picked some for a bouquet, intrigued by their floral scent. But by the time she got them inside, the perfume was gone and all that was left was the musky smell that she’d always associated with tobacco. To her, as a child, even before the dangers of secondhand smoke were widely known, the smell of cigarettes always seemed offensive, dirty, gross. But growing tobacco has forced her to relearn the odor, create new associations. A scent she once connected with secondhand smoke has now mostly been replaced with more pleasant garden associations.
I lean in to smell the strangely dual-scented jasmine tobacco blooms, and when I get too close, flyaway pieces of my hair stick to the plant, as though it’s attempting to pull me in. Briefly, it succeeds. But I pinch a flower stem and pull away, freeing myself to go sit in my chair like a vase.
Taking cues from the insects munching around us, Amy—a host prone to old-fashioned hospitality—slips inside and returns with slices of homemade bread and cups of hot tea, sweetened with local honey. Her reappearance inspires the last of the vultures to fly off, leaving us to dine with warm-faced marigolds on a carpet of forget-me-nots.
As it grows darker, Amy notices that a light has been left on inside the house. She makes a tsk-tsk sound before going to turn it off. “Since I saw my hawk moth, I’ve been making sure to keep things dark,” she says. Now that we’re sitting here, awaiting dusk, she finds it interesting that she’d never really considered how artificial light might be altering the plants she spends so much time fretting over. Darkness has, after all, long taken over for her in the evening, safeguarding even diurnal bloomers so that she didn’t have to water them periodically.
Amy is always thinking about sunlight, where she should plant things so they might maximize growth. She even owns a grow light that mimics the sun. But she’s never really considered that pulling her living room shades down or turning off her lights would make any difference for her plants. But now it strikes her as headshaking-hard-to-believe that, though she’s given an occasional thought to shade, she’s never thought much about how natural night is cyclically required for flowers’ photosensitive cycles.
Research on the overall effects of light pollution on plants is still sparse, but artificial light has been found to change entire grassland communities, with plants that respond more positively to electric lights pushing out other species. And some plants, particularly trees, leave their pores open for unnaturally long periods under the influence of artificial light, which makes them more sensitive to air pollution and drought. Masking natural night with artificial light can alter a tree’s immune system, not unlike how lost sleep lowers human defenses. Some plants stressed by artificial light have been found to over-photosynthesize in attempts to match its unnatural energy, which creates more stress. Under artificial light, plants cannot properly rest. They do not have the time they need to process, like animals denied dreaming.
As we wait, perched on the edge of twilight, Amy tussles with her sheep dog, who is restless without herding tasks. I cannot sit still, either. I tap my feet, watch for vultures that might rejoin our party. But, in time, a strange thing happens—as darkness rises, our attention tightens. Our feelings that we should be taking care of something else disappear.
We focus on a single blossom. “Can you tell a difference? Are those petals moving? They’re a little less green, right?” The petal undersides are lime green, but Amy assures me that they’re going to reveal new things.
“When they’re open they’re clearly white, not green at all,” she tells me. I cannot understand what she means. I have only seen what exists, not what is yet to be. Amy knows what they look like in full form, but she has never watched their process of becoming. She has only seen these flowers closed in daylight and open-hand-waving in the evening.
Slowly, then suddenly, one bloom takes the lead in opening. Each petal is relaxing, not stem to sky, but center-petal out. “They’re curled like tongues!” Amy exclaims. “I never realized each petal had to unfurl on its own like that.” Before, the flower was so sealed it was almost a bud. Now, it’s loose enough for me to see that, though the bottoms of the petals are green, the tops are stark white.
These flowers are basically turning themselves inside out. And they’re doing it together, like synchronized dancers. One by one, they match the stance of the precocious flowers around them. Each motion fills the air with fragrance. Gone is the smell of cigars in a wood-paneled room. Rising is the smell of luscious floral perfume—the likes of which I’ve never experienced. This blooming tobacco is clean as evergreen with a spoonful of sugar on its breath.
We fumble and fail to find words to explain the way our bodies are reading the signals these flowers are emitting. I close my eyes, inhale deeply. Just as foxfire showed me that I have better night vision than I imagined, I can feel these night bloomers introducing me to my sense of smell as one that I have, thus far, mostly ignored as important. Every waft feels like gratitude for the sense of smell I’ve been taking for granted—maybe, as a species, most humans have.
A University of Manchester study suggests that we are losing our sense of smell due to genetic changes. Sight, the sense it seems we tend to value most—the sense we associate as being supported by artificial light—has apparently taken the lead in evolutionary progression. No one is entirely sure what’s happening, but various studies about loss of smell, anosmia, have shown that air pollution—especially particulates from burning fossil fuels—might be partially to blame. Researchers in Italy, Brazil, Sweden, and elsewhere have identified a nearly twofold risk of developing anosmia when people live in areas with sustained air pollution. Anosmia has also, for years now, been recognized as a distinct COVID symptom.
Still, our collective sense of smell remains relatively acute in the scheme of things—more acute, some scientists say, than we often give it credit for. We can smell just as well as some dogs we admire as supreme sniffers; it’s just that we’re gifted at smelling different things. Even so, it’s hard to get over: Our species might never again be this sensitive to the nuances of flower language on our evolutionary journey.
The scent of these tobacco flowers is so strong that it chases me around the garden. I ask Amy if she is experiencing a similar phenomenon, and she confirms that she, too, can feel the scent growing so thick that it seems it might, any minute, become visible, hanging in the air around us. Still, we’re not sure if the flowers are producing more concentrated perfume, or if we’re just becoming more sensitive to it. Maybe it’s both, a sensory meeting of species.
Many night bloomers have enhanced, nonvisual characteristics to attract pollinators like moths and, in some cases, bats. They include fragrance, and the human olfactory system is connected to circadian rhythms that fluctuate in relative alignment with them. According to a 2017 study conducted by Brown University, human olfactory ability is strongest in the evening around 9:00 p.m. It is at the exact time nocturnal-blooming flowers begin to reveal themselves—with their scent levels deepening in darkness—that our senses peak to meet them.
In watching the behavior of these flowers, I feel like I am being instructed to remember that my sense of smell is not some add-on, something lower in hierarchy to sight; it is a fundamental part of how I engage with the world around me. It’s a glory that screens cannot begin to transmit, so lovely that I can hardly stand it.
Amy directs me to touch the silvery cool of a lamb’s ear plant she’s growing near tobacco. It is commonly planted in moon gardens because of the way it catches moonlight in velveteen foliage. She planted it because, as a shepherdess, she adores the leaves’ texture, soft as the actual ears of a newborn lamb. Also, because Honeysuckle House’s early inhabitants would likely have spent time enjoying this species in evening, after they’d tended to their own flocks.
When Amy notices a seed pod that’s fallen from tobacco, she picks it up and motions for me to open my hand. Under the pressure of her finger, the pod breaks open and seeds fall freely. I press an index finger to where they’ve pooled in the center of my palm and roll the seeds of dark matter—hard and round as musket balls—with the tip of my index finger.
“Some seeds need total darkness to germinate; others need a little light,” Amy tells me. “These will do best right at the top of the soil. My hope is that these plants will self-seed and that, left alone, they’ll be carried by wind.” But, given that I already have a handful of dark orbs, Amy suggests that I might spread these myself, as an offering. “Just toss them in there,” she says. I roll the seeds across and out of my palm, grateful for the opportunity to participate.
It’s soon cold enough for Amy to go inside to dig a jacket out of winter storage. In her absence, I can make out the rustling of sheep in the hillside pasture above. I am alone. Only, I am not. My eyes catch on a shadow. A hawk moth passes, quick as a paintbrush stroke.
The moth is gone by the time Amy returns. She’s disappointed to have missed it, and I’m sad to have only seen it as a smudge. But we’re both glad the creature has inspired us to lift our collective gaze, so that we might study the moon that has risen while we were focused on flowers. The silvery circle is precisely nestled between an exterior wall of Honeysuckle House and the ancient mountain that anchors it. The match of earth and sky is so perfect, it looks like a homespun Stonehenge. Amy settles into her chair, down jacket billowing. She’s lived here nearly twenty years, but she’s never seen the moon at this exact time, in this exact season, the way all these moving parts of nature sync. It’s delicious.
In her day job, Amy is a psychology professor who teaches things like evolutionary and conservation psychology. Recently, she’s been reading about a concept known as generational amnesia, and our moon garden experience is reminding her of it. “Basically,” she says, “we get used to the way things are, and we forget the way they were. The baseline for what we think of as normal keeps changing.”
Of her homestead, Amy says, “I love this place, but it’s easy to forget that my pasture used to be forest. In the future, if the farmland around here is taken for development, people will forget that this used to be agricultural. Each time, we sense a loss. But over a long stretch, people lose perspective and can’t remember what those losses mean.”
As each generation inherits the world, we become increasingly forgetful of how things were before, and we forget how they might be. For better and worse, ever and always. We forget that the things we take for granted were, at some point in human history, new inventions. We accept that our sense of smell is what it is. We forget that landscapes we admire as wild or bucolic or supremely cultivated were, in the past, different.
Psychologist Peter Kahn, who coined the term “generational amnesia,” suggests that this memory loss has generally resulted in an ever-downward shift in terms of what we accept as ecological health. One example often used is how elders can remember a time when driving at night meant finding the remains of hundreds of bugs on windshields. Now, insect populations have dwindled so much that, when night driving, you might not even find one. Yet, due to slow acclimation, we don’t think much of it. And the next generation doesn’t think of it at all.
When he conducted a study about how kids in urban Texas perceived the quality of their environment, he found that, though they understood pollution as a concept, they didn’t realize that they lived in an area with serious amounts of it. Kahn later observed that it’s hard enough to deal with environmental issues when we recognize them, but there’s not even a desire to act if we cannot remember the way things once were or recognize how bad they’ve gotten. He’s called generational amnesia “one of the most pressing psychological problems of our lifetime.”
Face-to-face with night bloomers, realizing that our peculiar, lights-out evening was, for generations before us, just a regular Saturday, Amy’s starting to think that generational amnesia is especially relevant to darkness. We’ve almost wholly acclimated to night as a place of artificial light, and we have generally forgotten the necessary pleasures of the dark. Night, like so many things she cares about, is an heirloom under threat.
“We get used to lights, and we forget that, at one time, people just had oil lanterns. We forget that, before that, people just had fire and candles.” Not so long ago and not in some far-off place, but, right here, in the memory of people she knows, people who grew up in and around Honeysuckle House. It’s one of the reasons she loves living in a house that doubles as historic artifact—it comes with stories that give perspective. Every bedroom fireplace is a reminder of how her later-installed central heat is a marvel.
It seems particularly poignant that my search for night bloomers has led to tobacco plants, which have their own worrisome form of generational amnesia. According to the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, the tobacco genus “has probably been responsible for more deaths than any other herb,” going on to call it “the most important avoidable cause of pre-mature death and disease in the world.”
These are things I pretty much knew, given public health warnings and labels that became legal obligations in my lifetime. But, in the arc of the human story, tobacco has only recently been cast as a villain. In fact, it was once—and for a very long time—considered a creature with life-affirming powers all its own.
Indigenous communities in the Andes have cultivated tobacco since prehistory, and for generations, many cultures across the Americas have fostered diverse sacred, ceremonial, religious, and medicinal relationships with the plant. Tobacco has long been used as an offering that honors relationships between physical and spiritual worlds in a variety of disparate traditions, and it plays a role in some creation stories, which depict tobacco as among the first plants that humans were able to grow on this planet.
To aid public health, organizations like the National Native Network are working to reclaim traditional relationships to tobacco, which—unlike commercial tobacco use—rarely involve inhaling smoke. Their tagline: Keep It Sacred. The group’s efforts to revive generational memory include the encouragement of garden-growing native North American Nicotiana rustica as a way of replacing notions of tobacco as something cut and dried with understandings of it as a living being, thirsty and alive.
It might seem impossible to change the course of generational amnesia about anything. But, bit by bit, maybe it isn’t. After all—in a reversal of my lifetime of being acculturated to view tobacco as a commercial product—I know that, after tonight, I will never again hear the word “tobacco” without bypassing cigarettes to envision this fragrant garden. Here, tobacco is shelter and nourishment for various creatures, including hornworms and sphinx moths, and I have directly witnessed tobacco’s role in sustaining life rather than snuffing it out. It is not unlike how I have been changing the way I connect with natural night, fumbling into ancestral times that, before holding counsel with fireflies, I’d never thought much about.
In recent years, astronomers have started to warn that even the satellites sent up to share human-derived information are now creating substantial light pollution from above, reflecting sunlight with varied brightness. They are basically fake moons, and large numbers of them are being deployed by for-profit industry without much scrutiny, creating light interference that makes it difficult for astronomers to see beyond our species’ influence.
Some astronomers, concerned about the increase of visible light from Earth’s surface and from low-orbit satellites, have started likening light-polluting industries as relatable to “Big Pharma” and “Big Tobacco” and “Big Oil,” going so far as to coin light-polluting industries as “Big Light.” NASA reports that, already, there’s so much light pollution that they have lost the ability to properly warn against incoming asteroids.
“We talk about things like this all the time in my class on evolutionary psychology,” Amy says. “Humans take something that we’re drawn to, something that has some positive associations, maybe due to some evolutionary or physiological premise that has made it helpful in small doses, or used in a certain way, and we go on to turn it into something that causes harm. Human-made light, tobacco—there are tons of examples. Figuring out how to stop doing that is one of the great human questions.” Because, in too large a dose, any medicine can turn into poison.
Accessing the health of natural night is difficult because artificial light invades other people’s space like secondhand smoke. It is, in the shared airspace of this planet, pretty much impossible to escape. Everywhere is, in terms of light pollution, like sitting in the smoking section. People light up and the effects spread.
Even here, miles outside of our rural town—on this turn-of-the-century homestead, where there are no localized lights buzzing—skyglow is present as a sickly green halo in the distance. Amy calls light pollution from the direction of town “Booneshine.” It’s a locally familiar, cheeky ode to moonshine liquor, which mountaineers famously brewed at night to evade detection during Prohibition. For now, moonshine—that is to say, the reflection of sunlight off the surface of the moon—remains brighter than Booneshine on full-moon nights like this. But, incrementally, it’s becoming a competition.
As if just thinking about it makes her crave base-level connection, Amy reaches out to break off a small piece of tobacco leaf, touching the broken plant membrane to her tongue. “Bitter,” she says.
“Think that’s because of the nicotine?” I ask.
“Maybe.”
My hand hovers over bunches of silvery sage until I find the stickiness of a tobacco leaf. I break it open and touch its green to my tongue’s pink. The leaf delivers zest that makes me throw my head back, like I’m swallowing a pill, on instinct.
Amy laughs. “I don’t know about you, but I’m going to need something to get that taste out of my mouth,” she says, retrieving a stash of chocolate stored in a glass jar. “Cacao—now, there’s a complicated plant story.”
She’s referring to the tree that produces the seed that is used to make chocolate, a crop that has been responsible for a great deal of deforestation all over the world—as has tobacco farming—due to insatiable, cross-cultural human appetites for it. Ever mindful, Amy is serving chocolate that has been shade-grown, in alignment with traditional Mayan and Aztec cultivation methods that utilized dark sinkholes, where flowering cacao trees were regarded as gifts of the gods. The revival of shade-grown cacao among foodies—a happy if small-scale reversal of the chocolate industry—has led to increased biodiversity, supporting birds and mammals and reptiles the world over.
Around us, star-seed tobacco flowers, caught in the uptick of a breeze, start to twinkle. Their movement stirs memory of something that Amy has long known but somehow never registered as important until now: Every chocolate birthday cake we’ve ever consumed, every candy bar we’ve ever enjoyed, the very confection that we are eating, they have all originated from cacao trees—plants that only bloom at night, leisurely opening at twilight, just like tobacco plants. We are savoring the flavor of trees tended by darkness.
Cacao is cultivated in fifty countries around the world—all of it grown in moon-garden groves that depend, in part, on the cycles of natural night. Amy reaches out to hand me another piece of chocolate. I slip the bittersweet wafer into my mouth, and we sit there for a long while—nursing night’s imported confection, basking in the perfume that local darkness is distilling.
After my time at Honeysuckle House, I start to suspect that there might be nocturnal wildflowers in my neighborhood. I amass a small collection of field guides and gardening books, including an out-of-print title that was inspired by flowers blooming in containers on a New York City balcony. The book assures me that, for night-blooming wonder, preelectric homesteads are not a requirement.
I start to pay closer attention to flora, night and day, just as, in my search for foxfire, I began to familiarize myself with all kinds of fungi. It seems a stretch that I’m going to come across a night bloomer with my casual study. But, given all that I’ve unearthed in darkness, I remain hopeful.
Years ago, I kept a vegetable garden by the river, until I decided that, because I am a forgetful weeder and water transporter, it would be best to just let the patch of land go. In other words, it became free to do what it wanted—and what it wanted was to grow daisies and black-eyed Susans and blackberry bramble. Now, the garden is a tangled mass of petal-faces strange and familiar.
Newly empowered, I examine every wildflower I can find, inspect every dab of color. One day, climbing from the river to my house, I’m drawn by bits of yellow along a retaining wall, where I discover a sundrop flower. It’s a day bloomer, but it’s related to the evening primrose that inspired Kim, my milkweed-farming friend from Mothapalooza, to start moth watching.
I sit on a stone, warm with sunlight, to study another slender stalk with nondescript leaves. Seen in juxtaposition to the sundrop, I can tell it’s an altogether different species. Its blooms are not yet mature. They’re held too tightly for identification via my cell phone app. I take a photo and send it to knowledgeable friends. Back inside, I pull out my books. There is, it seems, a chance that I have a stand of primrose growing not ten feet from my back door.
That evening, I intend to take a night walk to see if my suspicions prove correct. But there is schoolwork to oversee. There are meals to make. I forget.
At dawn, after the hustle of seeing Archer off to school, I recall that, if visited in the early morning hours, night bloomers can sometimes be caught before they drop their petals. If my yard hosts evening primrose, it will take a few hours for the sun to burn off their beauty.
I don’t have to go far, just past a dwindled woodpile, where I find that some puckered green buds have expanded into tiny yellow flowers that look as luscious as hibiscus. I have not watched them expand in fading light, but I’m nearly positive that this is a stand of primrose. And, to confirm, I will unquestionably be attending their next soiree.
At sunset, I confirm the unbelievable: Though I’ve never planted a moon garden, I’ve been living in the middle of one. Once I can identify primrose in daylight, I find that my yard is full of it.
In addition to the plants by my woodpile, there are whole fields of primrose downhill from my house. At dusk, they turn buttercup yellow. And I want to revel in them like the bumblebee that, just yesterday, I watched writhing at the center of a shag-carpet thistle.
For weeks, I amble meadows at dusk. In time, I develop a favorite patch of primrose. The stem bits that serve as latches for holding primrose blooms tight release around eight or nine. This is the same time that a family of deer regularly makes its way through the field below my house. The first night our paths cross, the deer come up behind me, making me jump with their annoyed snorts. But on evenings after that, with distance, we find a rhythm to sharing the space, rotating with varied paths on the property—which was, according to neighborhood elders, forest, cabbage field, and then horse-turned-cow pasture before becoming my yard.
One night, after the deer have passed, Wilder trots along after me. Fog gathers on my jacket as we walk through fallen clouds. The ground is damp. Still, I lie on it, pressing high grass into the shape of my body. When I rise, I will leave an imprint, just like the deer who bed down here.
I watch primrose as intently as I watched jasmine tobacco, waiting for the moment when they will drop their latches. When it happens, they turn into tiny ballerinas, skirts swishing. Wilder, frisky though he might be, has taken to lying with me in the primrose patch. Tonight, he remains alert, but, like me, he seems sleepy. We’re deep in a river-sung lullaby when suddenly, an unidentified object. Sky, smeared like an out-of-focus photograph. Then, again. This time, Wilder jumps up to make a lunge. I follow his lead, trying to get a better look. A hawk moth.
The creature appears to float over flowers of interest. In some species, moth wings move at 85 beats per second. Watching this still feels less frenetic than doomscrolling screens. I stand statue-still in the moon garden that I’ve unwittingly shaped by doing nothing at all. This is a moth’s true home—in the dark, nuzzling flowers.
The moth is close enough for me to see a straw tongue unfurling to connect with the interior of these night bloomers, which are, alongside Nicotiana, among their favorites. The hawk moth and the primrose are puzzle-pieced together, just as I fit into my makeshift nest of sedge grass. This scene is a romantic-era painting, and I’ve stepped right inside of it, surrounded by wildflowers that, freshly opened, are overflowing with starlight.
The hawk moth flies toward me, then over me. I grasp Wilder’s collar. He’s prone to chasing butterflies, but I have seen him pause to watch fireflies. The hawk moth seems to have stunned him into curiosity. It’s unlikely that the hawk moth will return to this spot once it’s gone. There are, after all, other stands of primrose, though the spot I’ve chosen does feel like a floral smorgasbord. I sniff the blooms that have been abandoned and get a hint of meringue. I consider going inside, but Wilder doesn’t pull to leave, so I don’t tug, either. And I’m soon glad we’ve stayed.
When the moth returns, it brings another—and another, and another—until I am surrounded by prehistoric moths the size of birds. They are encircling me, swarming. This moon garden isn’t mine, it’s ours. The hawk moths come and go to and from places unknown, sometimes navigating mere inches away, where I can hear their scaled wings, fragile and faster than wailing helicopter blades.
Hawk moth. Sphinx. The words feel strange in my mouth when I whisper them to myself. In Egyptian mythology, the Sphinx was a winged creature that guarded sacred locales, and beloved Appalachian poet Wendell Berry has written that “there are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.” But even desecrated places can be reclaimed.
Native plants have gained popularity in recent years. So has the concept of rewilding, which is generally used to refer to returning a piece of land to ecological complexity. Restoring natural darkness is part of that. But rewilding is a term that can also be used to refer to a person. And, though wilderness is often defined as a place that’s uncultivated or abandoned, I think a more apt definition would be a measure of how rich something is in terms of living connection. Wilderness is a place that requires the animals inhabiting it to rise into their senses, alongside other species, in orchestration. And I am wilder for being here, with Wilder, surrounded by these nocturnal beings.
Cyclical darkness, which we all evolved with, fosters interconnectivity that we’re only beginning to grasp. This is a moon garden that no human has tended, yet it has been well maintained. Because the primrose knew what to do. Hawk moths, too. I’m enjoying a moon garden that they have been tending for longer than Homo sapiens have resided here. Some humans might have generational amnesia, but some other species do not. We are surrounded by land with memories longer than our own. These flowers are of lineages that were growing before I was conceived. They will, hopefully, outlast me with their new-moon faces, in perpetuity.
Scientists at the University of Arizona—focused on primrose species that prefer arid environments, of which there are many—found that the energetic cost of hovering is, for moths, one hundred times that of a moth resting. As soon as the sun sets, they frenzy to find nectar, but they must be careful about how they expend their energy.
Hawk moths have been drawn into tonight’s rendezvous not only by sight or scent, but by the rise of the flowers’ breath. Recently, scientists have learned that moths are able to sense levels of humidity around flowers in addition to being attracted by color and shape. High humidity indicates that a given bloom is worthy of attention. It’s a read of sensory clues that can mean the difference between life and death. Still, I was surprised to learn that nectar is mostly odorless. A flower’s fragrance is typically emitted from petals, like pheromones from skin.
These creatures aren’t just seeing nectar; they can feel it sure as steam rising from hot, honeyed tea. And, in just a few hours, the blooms we’re all enjoying in this wild-sown moon garden will wilt and fall like autumn leaves. But there is solace in knowing that, tomorrow, fresh blooms will twirl into being.
From the other side of the county, Amy continues to send kitchen-garden updates, including word that she recently watched a hornworm pupate, burying itself in a soil-tomb with a promise to rise in spring. “Now that I know he’s there, I want to do what I can to help him,” she tells me.
Her scythe might call to mind the Grim Reaper, but she’s been thinking that her aeration roller, with its soil-needling spikes, is more dangerous. She is already considering how she’ll have to be careful when she goes to roll it across the ground next year, lest she accidentally hurt a sphinx in the making.
In addition to planning next year’s night bloomers, she’s decided to cultivate persimmon trees. She’s long thought of growing them so that she might make preserves from their sugar-bomb fruit. But she’s ultimately been spurred into motion because they are favored by luna moths. In future years, those native trees will siren-call luna moths’ pale green wings into her kitchen garden for communion.
Already, Honeysuckle House is full of old seed catalogs with night bloomers circled. Already, in daily surveys, I’m making conscious decisions about what not to do, scouting mowed portions of my yard that might best be left for wind and birds to sow.
Around us, autumn moves on, colors ebbing and flowing with tides of darkness and light. There are cooler temperatures and longer nights. It’s nearing winter. But around Boone, things haven’t been settling down. If anything, traffic is amping up.
Tourists have started to arrive in droves, hoping to catch long-range views of fall foliage. In these mountains, we take the leaf-peeping season so seriously that local scientists run calculations about quality of red and gold and the timing of leaf die-off. Telecasters give color reports from newsrooms far off the mountain. There are websites dedicated to reviewing color change at certain elevations. Predictions account for temperature and rainfall. But natural darkness, which is orchestrating the entire show, is rarely talked about.
Now that I’ve been introduced to night bloomers, it’s easier to see all plants as photosensitive creatures. Just as night bloomers’ photoreceptors tell them when to bloom in fading light, longer periods of darkness tell trees when to drop their leaves. This has always been a reliable process, a universal language that all sorts of species read. But it’s no longer one that we can take for granted.
Over a decade ago, scientists in the United Kingdom started a long-term study to see if artificial light might affect the budding and blooming of urban trees. They were surprised to find that spring budding and autumnal leaf-fall were altered in communities of high artificial light by more than a week.
At first, they thought it might be due to heat pockets caused by urban living, or some other temperature-related symptom of climate change. But evidence ultimately showed that the shift in seasons was solidly due to photosensitive reactions. Artificial light, all on its own, had become concentrated enough to shift seasons. Like moths that forget to pupate due to light, under duress, trees forget to pull nutrients back into their bodies for winter dormancy. They forget to let go of their leaves. They cannot sort the temporal-cue difference between natural light and the light humans create.
I’m beginning to think that, in a time when the Milky Way is obscured by shrouds of our own making, we might already have a level of generational amnesia that renders stargazing a nonfunctional enticement. We have inherited, across cultures, sacred-sky stories. But we generally can no longer see the starlight that our ancestors were interpreting.
We cannot, as individuals, meaningfully reduce light pollution enough to revive massive darkness; we cannot easily solve systemic problems. But we can change our immediate environs in ways powerful enough to alter the health of nearby night bloomers and the trees we know personally. We can take care of ourselves, and each other, by darkening our yards and neighborhoods, starting immediately.
Maybe, if actions were taken in enough places, by enough night-curious people—through individual actions and increasing demand for regulations that address the public expense of artificial light at the local, regional, national, and global level—natural darkness could start to knit itself back together like bone and tissue, like living nets of mycelia.
At the peak of leaf-peeping season, Amy invites me back to Honeysuckle House for a potluck to mark the shift to greater periods of darkness. On my way to the merriment of hand-cranked apple cider and picnic tables covered in casseroles, a stoplight forces me to pause just outside of Boone, right next to the sign that welcomes visitors—many of whom come to enjoy the Blue Ridge Parkway, a famed scenic road that runs through our county.
The sign features wildflowers and the wood-carved likeness of an autumnal leaf. Adjacent highway edges are usually trimmed by road crews. But this patch has escaped the attention of weed eaters.
Alone in my car, I start laughing. I cannot help myself. The profile is unmistakable: Slender green stalk. Tight leaves. Pursed buds. There is a substantial stand of primrose here, frozen in sun-retreat stance, poised to greet leaf-seeking pilgrims. In these mountains, where visitors have come to watch dead leaves fall in daylight, there will be blooms rising, mostly unnoticed, in darkness.
Undoubtedly, many of the leaf-lookers have stands of primrose growing in their own neighborhoods, along their own municipalities’ unkempt curbs, state beyond state. There are more than 400 species of the Primula genus across the Northern Hemisphere, with more than a few night bloomers. Many are not, by human hands, tended. Moon gardens, particularly those of the wild variety, are unique to their own dark ecosystems. But if we go looking for them, pretty much anywhere moths roam, we will find them, diverse as their native environs.
Nocturnal-blooming flowers grow in both temperate and arid environments. In swamps, deserts, prairies, rainforests, suburbs, and city parks. Everywhere, there are secret gardens hiding in plain sight, under the cover of daylight. Still, I know from experience that it takes practice to see the wildflowers for the weeds. Because experiencing their charm requires that we allow our skin, alongside petals, to be steeped in darkness and doused with moonshine, unadulterated.