Queen of the Night: The strange cactus that blooms into a flower once a year  

Mother Nature never fails to amaze us. In fact, she harbours flora and fauna that are so mysterious and so mesmerising that it makes us feel small. One such is the Queen of the Night. Wondering what or who is she? Well, she is a cactus species.  

For most the year, the plant looks like a spindle-like grey stick that can barely support itself and is thus mostly underground. It usually grows up to 3 feet tall, but has the potential to go up to 9 feet. Native to the American subcontinent, it is extremely hard to locate unless it blooms into a flower. How does it look then? In one word, beautiful! It takes the shape of a palm-sized white flower that looks somewhere in between a tulip and a rose, with a touch of orange and green on the flattened stems. At times, a red coloured oblong-shaped fruit also accompanies the flower.  

Now, what’s strange is that the flower only blooms once a year, that too at night. Not only that, it is not just one flower that blossoms, it is an entire family of it. Today, let us discuss everything about the Queen of the Night in its full glory. 

The bloom coincides with a full moon 
For 364 nights, the plant remains in the form of a withered cactus. However, on a full moon night in either June or July, it takes the shape of a full-grown white flower with a hypnotic vanilla-scented fragrance. Not only that, the Queen of the Night, blossoms only when it rains heavily on that full moon night. Simply put, the flower arrives as soon as the sun sets and wilts the moment it rises back. What’s interesting and mysterious is that the flowers not only dry up and shed the petals, but also goes back to its previous shape. However, apart from the rain and moon cycle, what exactly makes the flower bloom is still a mystery. In addition, one cannot predict the blooming, until the day it happens. 

Blooms all at once due to cross pollination 
Unlike most flower-bearing plant that self-pollinates, the Queen of the Night depends on cross pollination. Not only that, it depends on its own kind for the process. So, it means that the transfer of pollen that usually happens from one plant species to another, here, happens between the same species. So, it is an intra cross pollination. As a result, not one but all flowers bloom at once in the same colony, on the same night and withers together the next morning. So, it is as if they are born together and die together for the sake of reproducing annually and can’t really exist independently. Scientists believe this pollination is furthered by heat, daylight and moisture all at once, just the afternoon before its nocturnal blossom. Okay, but what facilitates it? Well, that would be some kind of an unknown chemical communication.  

Found only in Tucson  
Since the plant is extremely difficult to locate in the wild, it has been privately set up in two botanical gardens, both located in Tucson, Arizona, USA. One is called Pima Prickly Park and the other is called Tohono Chul. However, both of these gardens experience the blossoms on two different nights, although that surely falls between the summer months of June and July. While Tohono Chul has the world’s largest private collection of this cactus, as many as 400 of them; Pima Prickly Park has around 100. Interestingly, the gardens have been naturally set up for the plant to blossom with sandy and gravelly soil, and underneath a desert shrub. At both these places, ahead of the night the Queen of the Night blooms together with its comrades, people gather around from before and make an event of it.