Birth flower for August 5
Queen of the night
Meaning: fleeting beauty, a moment of eternity
This cactus blooms only at night: around eight or nine in the evening a huge white flower slowly unfurls and fills the room with perfume, then droops by dawn. In Chinese the phrase for it has become an idiom for any brief, dazzling moment, and in Japan it is poetically called the beauty under the moon. Many families in Taiwan stay up to watch it open, then dry the spent flowers for soup.