Last night the night-blooming Cereus bloomed in our area. While Tohono Chul Park and the Cactus Society's park on River Road got all the press, we went looking for wild specimens here in the creosote flats of Picture Rocks. We took off around sun rise, shortly after 5 am. The flowers were still crisp when we started but began to wilt before we go home around 7 am.
We found more than 20 blooming plants and several that took the year off. Most plants do that from time to time - the whole over-ground part of the plant, which is pretty thin to begin with, shrivels up and looks dead. Luckily, a fresh trunk eventually springs from the under-ground tuber and in a couple of years will be ready to bloom.
Most plants had 1 to three flowers, about knee to wast high and hidden within creosote bushes. Their sweet cloying fragrance betrays them and optically they stand out as pale handsized signals even at dawn and even from a distance.
Randy, being a head taller than I, had a definite advantage spotting them after he had the search image down.
A few plants towered above their creosote companions with a whole array of flowers on an antler-like branched system of trunks. Here in the desert, the wild plants seem to max out at around a dozen flowers. Irrigated specimens in parks, under optimal conditions can have more than 20 flowers.
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