Moondance
In western North Carolina, the mountain growing season is short, and autumn is already tossing yellow-and-red confetti against my windshield as I drive the back roads to my friend Amy’s homestead. 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 now 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. This evening, we’re determined to stake out night-blooming flowers so that we can see them open in real time. To some, this might seem as thrilling as 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 live-streamed the nocturnal blooming of a moonflower—a petal explosion that lasted until daybreak. There are many species called moonflower. The one broadcast from the Cambridge greenhouse was an Amazonian cactus. 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—not via a screen but in person.
Moon gardens are made up of night bloomers and silver-and-white foliage meant to catch moonlight and release perfume. Many species bloom every evening, for as long as the flowering season lasts. These gardens enjoyed a surge of interest during the pandemic, when people were stuck at home in search of nightly entertainment, but they were also popular 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. Those long-ago moon gardens were a way of exploring human beings’ growing relationship with light. And the more I thought about the Cambridge moonflower, the more I began to wonder: How might modern moon gardens deepen our relationship with disappearing darkness?
The Victorians had a different relationship with nighttime than we do, but the Western world has long had a deep cultural bias against darkness. Almost every storyline we’re familiar with suggests that we should banish it as quickly as possible—because darkness is often presented as a void rather than a force of nature that nourishes lives, including our own.
This evening’s flower watch might seem eccentric in the electrified era, but it’s a practice that has 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 whether anyone I knew had one. I was particularly romanced by the idea of tropical moonflowers, large ones like Epiphyllum oxypetalum and Ipomoea alba, which resemble the morning glories that once grew feral along the edges of my grandfather’s tarpaper barn in a nearby county. Then one day I heard from Amy, who, it turned out, had sown some night bloomers that were maturing.
Amy is the kind of woman who spins yarn from the wool of her own sheep and grinds wheat berries to bake her own bread. Her home, known as Honeysuckle House, dates to the early 1890s, and she lives, in part, like a historical reenactor, pursuing house projects and activities that align with her home’s earliest days. She mows her yard with an antique scythe, which she stores in the corner of a room known as the parlor. Her garden, meanwhile, is filled with historically accurate plantings. She’d been drawn to the tobacco genus Nicotiana not because these plants bloom at night but because they would have been grown on her Appalachian homestead c. 1900. 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 often frequented by large moths that can be mistaken for hummingbirds, creatures that coevolved with Nicotiana and other night bloomers like primrose, the shape of the moth’s proboscis almost an exact match for their tubular flowers. When she started going into her garden at night to look for hawk moths, one immediately showed up. The encounter, nothing more than a fleeting glimpse, was so moving that she nearly cried.
I get it. For several seasons, I have been making surprising discoveries in the dark, surrounded by animals that rise with the moon—creatures such as owls, salamanders, and glowworms. 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.
Amy and I have heard that if you catch Nicotiana at just the right time, it’s like watching a time-lapse video—but in three dimensions. 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, 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 as round and wide as Mason jars.
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.”
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 the winter. Past the springhouse, 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.
She lifts a creaking cattle gate, and we climb the pasture’s highest elevations. During this golden hour, the rolling hills are as resplendent as a crown, with a mountain valley blushing pink underneath. It is the view held all day, every day by her flock of Shetland sheep, bred to thrive in harsh conditions that mirror those of our western Carolina home. When we crest the top hill, woolly heads rise to register our presence before going back to grazing.
“Looks like they’re all okay,” Amy says before turning her eyes skyward, where the vultures have begun 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.
There must be a reason the scavengers are here. But Amy’s worried tone has mellowed. Now that she has 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 barbed wire 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 tends to be. The nutrients of those mothers’ placentas, no longer needed by the calves that they supported, can still nourish the community at large. The vultures are likely here to turn the remains of those domestic births into energy that might support their 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 with the birds closing in. We came fearing a funeral, and we found a birthday celebration instead, on the very evening that we’ve decided to watch flowers 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. When we reach the kitchen garden, we pull chairs across flagstone so that we might sit face to face with the 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 several species of Nicotiana. Some flowers 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.
Amy has laid down planks of weathered wood to help her reach the far end of her beds, where other species are growing along fieldstone bulkheads. Of particular interest is jasmine tobacco, Nicotiana alata, with tight green stalks—the night bloomer 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 get sticky residue on my hands. If tobacco is harvested without gloves, the absorbed nicotine can cause sickness.
Amy directs me to smell the tops of the 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. It is, for me, a shock to view tobacco as a living plant 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 packs of Camel Lights were given out as souvenirs. I was maybe 12. Although burley tobacco is nearly a bygone crop now, I have memories of it growing around Watauga County, where it was harvested and gathered in field bundles that looked, from a distance, like tents. Part of my house, on the banks of the New River, is a reclaimed tobacco barn, salvaged for lumber. Some of our rafters are primitive tobacco drying rods, straight limbs with bark still on them.
When Amy’s tobacco plants first bloomed, she picked some for a bouquet, fascinated by their floral scent. But by the time she got them inside, the perfume was gone and all that was left was that familiar musky smell. 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 and create new, more pleasant associations.
I lean in to smell the strangely dual-scented jasmine tobacco blooms, and when I get too close, flyaway strands 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.
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 the warm-faced marigolds.
As it grows darker, Amy notices that a light has been left on inside. 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 thought about how artificial light might be affecting 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 doesn’t have to water them periodically. Because, at night, the air cools. Moisture lingers.
Amy is always thinking about sunlight, where she should plant things to maximize their growth. She even has an indoor grow light that mimics the sun. But she’d never really considered that pulling down her living room shades or turning off her lights would make any difference for her plants. Though she’d given an occasional thought to shade, until now she’d never much dwelled on the importance of natural night—that is, a night sky with limited light pollution—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 interfere with 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 sheepdog, who is restless without any herding tasks to perform. 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. 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 as 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 an earlier encounter with bioluminescent foxfire showed me that I have better night vision than I imagined, I can feel these night bloomers introducing me to my own sense of smell, the importance of which I have, thus far, mostly ignored. Every waft feels like gratitude for this sense I’ve been taking for granted.
A study published in a 2022 issue of the journal PLoS Genetics suggests that we are losing our sense of smell because of genetic changes. Sight, the sense it seems we tend to value most—the sense we think of 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 the loss of smell, or anosmia, have shown that air pollution—especially particulates from burning fossil fuels—might be partially to blame. Researchers have identified a nearly twofold risk of developing anosmia in people who live in areas with sustained air pollution. Our collective sense of smell does remain relatively acute in the scheme of things—more acute, some scientists say, than we often give it credit for. Even so, it’s hard to get over the idea that on our evolutionary journey, our species might never again be this sensitive to the nuances of flower language.
The scent of these tobacco flowers is so strong that it chases me around the garden. I ask Amy whether she is experiencing something similar, and she confirms that she, too, can feel the scent growing so thick that it seems it might, at any minute, become visible, hanging in the air around us. Still, we’re not sure whether the flowers are producing more concentrated perfume or we’re just becoming more sensitive to the aroma. 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 Rachel Herz and colleagues at Brown University, human olfactory ability is strongest in the evening around nine p.m. It is around the same time that nocturnal 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 the tobacco. It is commonly planted in moon gardens for the way it catches moonlight. She planted it because, as a shepherdess, she adores the leaves’ velveteen 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 the evening, after they’d tended to their flocks.
When Amy notices a seed pod that has fallen from the 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 feel the black seeds—as hard and round as musket balls.
“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.
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