LEIGH ANN HENION is the author of Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Smithsonian, and other publications. This essay is adapted from her forthcoming book, Night Magic: Adventures Among Glowworms, Moon Gardens, and Other Marvels of the Dark, to be published by Algonquin Books.
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 populardarkness 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?