Night-blooming flower stops traffic on Pitts Bay Road

There’s a new tourist hotspot on the edge of Hamilton.

Repeatedly during recent nights, bikes and cars have pulled over at a certain spot on Pitts Bay Road to see and smell the beautiful Night-blooming Cereus that flower there.

The unusual blooms have attracted the attention of many white-helmeted riders over the past few evenings. On Sunday night, the flowers had captured the attention of two Bermuda residents, Brian and Natalie Erdelyi, who had stopped to share the sight and the “wonderful” smell with Brian’s cousin Attila Kiss and his wife Agnes who were visiting from Hungary.

To my uneducated botanical eye, the ‘moonlight cacti’ appear to be Selenicereus grandiflorus, and each flower blooms for only one night of the year and then withers. The flowers also produce a strong vanilla fragrance.

It is unclear how many individual cacti are growing there, or how many more blooms there may be, so if you want to take a peek you should hurry to the spot as twilight beckons tonight. You will find the flowers just across from the turn in to Living Waters church on Pitts Bay Road.