In search of the night-blooming cereus

I’m lucky to work from home, editing gardening articles for an online content company. One of the biggest perks of the job for me is the variety of obscure facts I run across. I adore and seek out random trivia, you see. It’s kind of a curse; I end up spending way too much time looking into odd subjects. The researching takes effort, but it's gratifying because cool things can pop up where you'd least expect them to.

Last week, I pulled up an article describing a fascinating cactus plant species (Hylocereus undatus) that produces a huge, stunning flower with an incredible edible dragonfruit. The fruit is known by many other names, including strawberry pear, pitaya and – wait for it – pitahaya.

You may know that Palm Desert has a street named Pitahaya. It's located off Highway 74 parallel to Highway 111. This caught my attention. Was the cactus grown by the early residents of that area? Do residents still grow it? Or did early community developers just like the sound of the Spanish word? I searched online but could not find much about the reason behind the naming. I tried Palm Desert Historical Society ... I'll try again when it reopens next October. Maybe some knowledgeable resident can shed some moonlight on the subject before then? If you know, let me know!

Anyhow, now I’d been dreaming for a week about growing this amazing night-blooming cereus in my own garden. The enormous white flower opens once and has that one night to be pollinated by bats or moths in order to bear a fruit. You’d think that because it’s a cactus and we live in the desert that we could plop it down and grow it anywhere in the valley. After further research, however, I found that it’s native to Central America and grows best in more tropical climates than ours (think Hawaii or Vietnam), but I think that we could grow it here with a little TLC and shade.

With this in the back of my mind, a friend and I visited the Moorten Botanical Garden in Palm Springs last weekend. Bingo! The garden had the cactus, sprawling huge, with small unopened buds just waiting to share their awesome bloom and fragrance. I came away inspired by the spectacular variety of desert plants ... and with a small cutting from the kind proprietor – a cereus of my own.

I imagine some night in the future it may bloom, and I'll visit it there in the moonlight. Who knows? It may possibly bear fruit that I'll savor, remembering the first time I marveled that a thing called a dragonfruit could pop up out of such an unassuming cactus.