CEREUS

While I had always photographed flowers, it was when our night-blooming cereus plant began to set buds a few years ago that I realized how much photography could mean for a bloom that only lasts a night - the chance to bring a beauty out of the night that it is queen of.  Over that summer we witnessed about half a dozen bloom nights, each with one to three three blooms.  At the end of the season I put together a book that celebrated the best images of this special flower.  

“And I think of the night-blooming cereus, a plant that looks like a leathery weed most of the year. But for one night each summer its flower opens to reveal silky white petals, which encircle yellow lacelike threads, and another whole flower like a tiny sea anemone within the outer flower. By morning, the flower has shriveled. One night of the year, as delicate and fleeting as a life in the universe.” -  Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew