Night blooms
When the sun goes down, fragrant flowers bring garden to life
Not long ago, I took advantage of a quiet evening at home and walked around the lake behind my house. The sun had just set and the light was fading quickly. As I made my way around the bank, casting a bass lure into the water every so often, I took note of what plants my neighbors were growing in their lakeside yards. I squinted through the gray light to make out the shapes and colors.
I smelled it before I saw it — a sweet, flowery fragrance came wafting along on the variable breeze. I inhaled deeply and looked for the source. There it was, filling up a fence corner — a night-blooming jasmine with its small white blooms. I caught its fragrance several more times as I continued around the lake’s bank. It was dark when I retraced my path to return home, but I could pick out the white blooms as I passed by and inhaled again before turning toward my backyard gate.
Gardening is not only for bright days, blue skies and warm sunlight. Gardening is also for evenings, for the shades of night lit by the moon or even by the dim lights of town. It’s for cicadas buzzing in the trees and frogs peeping alongside them as the night falls, and for bats careening through the sky eating more than their weight in mosquitoes, pollinating plants along the way.
It’s for pale blooms that remain open, offering themselves to the moon and stars, and to us. It’s for the plants that bloom only at night, saving themselves for the cooler moments, the secret, quieter moments, when the hubbub of daily life has died down, the day’s tasks have been either completed or set aside, and gardeners step outside to listen and watch the growing calm of the evening.
Night-blooming plants are perfect for Houston gardens, especially in the summer. Daytime temperatures drive even the most tenacious gardeners into the house. But nighttime is bearable. Savvy gardeners who plant the areas most accessible to the house door with night-blooming plants will have a beautiful, restorative space to enjoy even during some of our most miserable months.
Gardeners have lots of such plants to choose from, mainly because many varieties of plants not only bloom both day and night, but they also come in light colors like white, beige or yellow. Blooms in these colors will shimmer in the moonlight and will show up easily during other times of the month or during cloudy evenings.
Vincas, impatiens, dusty miller, begonias, oleander, plumeria, summer phlox, night-blooming water lilies and more all come