Lady of the Night or Cestrum Nocturnum

cestrum nocturnum in flower

By far my favourite plant for my Spanish garden is the Lady of the Night, otherwise known as Dama de Noche or Galan de Noche. The people of North America and Canada know it as Night Blooming Jasmine. It's correct botanical name is cestrum nocturnum (please check out the link, its one of my new sites).

 Lady of the Night is that plant that scents the summer evening air with a perfume to die for!

ou may have thought you were actually smelling jasmine, and maybe you were, but if the Lady of the Night is in flower, its scent is powerful enough to drown out all other scents.

Well, almost...it doesn't quite disguise the smell of the overloaded sewers in the heat of summer in parts of Benidorm, but it makes a good attempt!

It's flowers are nothing to look at during the day. Lady of the Night is a bush/shrub that reaches up to 15' tall, with bunches of small greenish-white tubular flowers that are closed and droopy during the day.

As soon as darkness falls, the flowers lift up and open wide, revealing a beautiful star-shaped opening on the bells. They then emit the most wonderful perfume that simply fills the night air and can be smelled from a distance away.

Sadly the flowering period only lasts a few days, so enjoy it while you can. It is reputed to discourage mosquitoes too, and that could be correct because the Night Blooming Jasmine is highly scented to attract some of the bigger insects like moths, that can effectively pollinate the flowers.

I don't know if moths also eat mosquitoes, and so mosquitoes stay away? Perhaps.

Cestrum nocturnum flowers up to 4 times a year.

Storm

I shouldn't have mentioned the 'no-rain' thing! Winter arrived with a vengeance yesterday. What a wild day it was! Sleet or snow, driven horizontaly inthe high winds, for hour and hours and hours. Course it seemed even longer when the powerfinally went off and stayed off. Thankfully we have a gas fire.

Today, damage-wise, the little cypress tree in the front garden is leaning at 45 degrees. The echium pininana is on it's side, and my lovely big cestrum nocturnum is at a precarious angle.
Upstairs on the terrace, I have lot a few palms that have been blown over and chucked out of their pots, but that should be repairable.

The little late tomato plants are OK. Well they are not dead yet, but the windchill factor yesterday must have been pretty unbearable for them, so I'll have to wait and see if they recover. Likewise the papaya. I'm sure tropical fruit would have hated the weather yesterday, and of course I didn't take them in for the winter.

Of course, it has to be said, that if they can't survive the odd freak weather day here, then they can't be grown here, except indoors. Need to find out which it is to be.