By day, Hylocereus undatus resists friendship. A climbing cactus, it can grow up to ten metres high, colonising trees and rock walls with extended, fleshy stems, massed like the arms of an octopus. Once native to Mexico and Central America, it now thrives in tropical and temperate regions around the world.
All year it sprawls, a spiked barricade – and then, one night, the flowers come.
Starting around dusk (depending on where in the world you are, how warm the day is, the ponderousness of clouds), the pale, waxy buds – which resemble elongated artichokes – start to open, the pink-tipped sepals peeling back millimetre by millimetre until, by midnight, the secret is told: the blossom announcing itself, so white it seems to glow, with skinny yellow streamers at its…
