In the daytime, the garden was full of busy, sun-loving flowers — the roses and the daisies, the sunflowers tall and proud, all of them turning their bright faces up to follow the sun across the sky. They were beautiful, and they knew it, and they soaked up every drop of golden light. But there was one corner of the garden that no one paid much attention to: a patch of plain, closed buds that simply sat there, quiet and green, all day long.
"What dull little things," sniffed the roses. "They never even open. What's the point of a flower that won't bloom?" The plain green buds said nothing. They only waited, patient and still, as the sun crossed the sky and slowly, slowly sank. For these were no ordinary flowers. They were moonflowers — and they kept a different kind of time.
As the last light faded and the first star appeared, something began to happen in the quiet corner.
Slowly, silently, the plain green buds began to open. They unfurled wide and white, glowing softly in the moonlight like little fallen moons of their own. They released a sweet, deep perfume into the cool night air — a scent far richer than any daytime flower's. And the sleeping garden, which had thought itself finished for the day, woke to a whole second kind of beauty it had never known.
The daytime flowers, dozing on their stems, could only blink in astonishment.
And then came the visitors. Soft-winged moths, pale and silver, fluttered out of the dark, drawn by the moonflowers' glow and their lovely scent. Velvet bats swooped gently overhead. A sleepy hedgehog snuffled out to enjoy the perfume. The whole night garden hummed with quiet life — a secret world that woke only after the sun had gone, hidden from all the proud daytime flowers who slept right through it.
When morning came, the moonflowers closed up again, plain and green and quiet, and the daytime flowers opened their bright faces to the sun. But now the roses understood. "We were wrong about you," they admitted. "You are not dull at all. You simply bloom in your own time, and your own light."
The moonflowers only smiled their secret nighttime smile.
"Not everyone is meant to shine in the same hour," they seemed to say. "The garden needs the day and the night, the sun and the moon, and a flower for each."
And from then on, the garden was beautiful all the way around the clock — bright by day, and glowing by night, with never a dull moment in between.