Night Blooming Cereus Fruit

Today, while hiking a dirt road on the bajada among prickly pear, yucca, and shrubby mesquite and acacias, we spotted a red glow under a mesquite tree. 

It’s the fruit of a night-blooming cereus, the twiggy cactus that is practically invisible for most of the year except on the night it blooms.  Here’s the fruit and the grayish-green stem up close in the late afternoon light:

It is famous for its glowing white, heavily-scented flowers, but the fruits are rarely photographed. Peniocereus greggii is rather rare and easy to overlook, and I’ve only seen a few wild plants.  They always seem more significant than might be expected from their appearance, perhaps because the thin stems, otherworldly flowers, and ephemeral fruits all spring from a large brown tuber that spends most of the year resting quietly in the desert earth.  A mysterious plant with a strong, undeniably feminine presence.  Photos of the flowers, taken at Tohono Chul Parkon several “Bloom Nights”, are here on my cactus website:

http://www.mineralarts.com/cactus/cereus.html