Magazine

National Geographic America Strikes Oil

In The Nocturnal Narrative Of a Garden at Night

The dramatis personae are widly fragrant blooms that unfurl in darkness like jasmine, tuberose, gardenia, luna moths with wings the color of celadon , and scrab beetles iridescent as opals. The moon, which illuminates this stage, borrows it’s light from the sun. It’s ashen light, the greek philosophers knew, is reflected. A night garden invites reflection, unlike the sun, the moon welcomes ourgaze. We can wax poetic, wane with melancholy-howl, even-and admire the wonder of an obverse world where plants reach out not to sunlight but to the faint glow flung to earth by a diadem of stars.

Color is mostly irrelevant in a night garden. Because of how the sees. Even the most incendiary reds and oranges turn into a monochrome of silver and grays under the waning moon. The retina, the sensitive lining of the eye’s interior is layered with photo receptive cells called rods and cones.rods which detect the intensity of light, can sense low levels of illumination but cones, which distingnish color, require a threshold of light higher than provided by the fading moon. In the absolute of that threshold, color washes away. The long exposure and sensitivity of digital imaging do what the retina cannot. Which why we see color in the see photograps.

Secien, so informative  can be so rude the perfume of flowers at night is nothing more than a ruse. Gardens at night more fra-grant than gardens at day became nocturnal pollinators have poor eyesight so must relyon their sense of small to find flowers, says john krees, eurator of botany at the Smithsonian in situations’s national museum of Natural History. The world of night bloomers and their pollinators is an alternate universe finely honed throught eons of evolutionary selection.