Midnight Gardens: Night-Blooming Flowers

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It may not look like it–and some groundhogs may beg to differ–but it’s almost spring here on Long Island (we’ll pause so you can take a victory lap around the room) and we’d like to think, at this very moment, our favorite garden is stirring beneath our snow-covered, rainbow-colored, star print, 100 percent all-natural rubber Chookah rain boots–yes we do wear them in public.

We’re not quite sure where to find it though because, like Platform Nine and Three Quarters, it comes to life among the bound pages of a book. But, like Jack Bauer, we’re sure it exists–somewhere.

Daphne du Maurier’s nameless heroine in Rebecca describes the blooms at Manderley estate as “crimson faces…slaughterous red, luscious and fantastic…monsters, rearing to the sky, massed like a battalion, too beautiful…too powerful…not plants at all.” With this in mind we’ve decided to design our own haunting garden, one that smells sweetest, like cloves and honey, and whose flowers only come to life in the darkest hours of the night.

MOONFLOWERS

You can actually watch the petals of the moonflower open from tight 5-pointed stars to large white trumpets in about 60 seconds as they release a strong, fruity bergamot fragrance as the moon rises. Known as the “devil’s trumpet”—or “angel’s trumpet”—depending on how you roll, the Moonflower is a classic “witches’ weed” which Nathaniel Hawthorne refers to in The Scarlet Letter as Apple-Peru.

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