NOTE: I wrote this post during the summer. Today our garden has an early fall look, but it's nice to remember!
Each year we plant two or three moon flower vines. And each year they’re more or less successful, depending on rainfall and temperatures as well as soil condition and the nature of the plants we buy. (The seeds don’t have time to mature in our Hardiness Zone 7a at 3400 feet.)
Soon after we began our garden in 2011, Sam introduced me to the large, lovely night-blooming moon flower. He says he learned about it from a garden book years ago. He first planted it on a doorway-shaped trellis that he built for his garden in town.
The architecture in our garden now gives it visual and real support. This year there’s a wire and branch trellis for scarlet runner beans, well-stretched white strings for spring peas, stakes with hand-written names of lettuce varieties and other vegetables, a new compost bin made of locust posts and deer-fencing scraps, a new bluebird house whose family is now flown, many dirt paths and some stone boundaries.
It all seems natural and alive because the plant life on these structures changes from year to year. Be sure to move the tomato stakes so last year’s horn worm grubs can’t find the new plants.
You never know with a garden what will happen. Too bad for me, a person (just ask Sam) who always wants to know what’s coming up (no pun intended).
The hollyhocks I once asked for in a fit of nostalgia had a slow start and vanished after two years. Three years ago deer severely set back our young Dutchman’s pipe vine, another of my childhood memories. But this year it’s five feet high on the black gum tree, and we’ve been watching swallowtail butterfly caterpillars eat their way through some of its leaves. Surprises all.
I know I’ve been avoiding talking about the moon flower vine. It’s a little hard to approach.
It was a couple of years ago that the beauty of one large, slowly unfurling, pure white star-shaped blossom so touched me that I could hardly bear knowing that it had only one brief night to be. One night to be open to the moths and the moonlight, and then at dawn, to gracefully fold; all this just once.
I can absorb this experience only by writing it out as a life lesson: after a struggle to take root and then to survive a chaotic environment, the moon flower’s full opening seems to me a thing to notice. It’s all itself, all by itself, wide open to the world, heedless of its brief existence.
The blossom is just one more part of its life cycle, complete in itself, now, no more no less.
I plan to go back out and stand in front of the next open moon flower, looking for how to shed my distracting human idea of “brief existence”.
I don’t know if I can find the way, but I believe that’s where a life secret lies.
I think there should be a book in your future! You write so beautifully.
I have grown what I thought were "moonflowers" for a couple of years and just learned that they are highly toxic datura plants. They are gorgeous, do bloom at night, and are very fragrant then and a little bit in the AM when they are beginning to fade. I noticed a hornworm on a stem and learned when I posted a picture on the Asheville Plant People Facebook group that it would develop into a sphinx moth that pollinates the datura. It stayed on the same stem and the next day I saw two small cocoons on it indicating that it had been attacked by a braconid wasp, which is a friend tomato wasps, since those hornworms will die from the invasion. Nature's battles are fascinating to learn about.