Evening Primrose - BLInspirations

Last year, Beverly planted some Evening Primrose seeds and this summer we have been enjoying the show each evening as the new blossoms open. It is so awesome to be looking at an unopened flower bud and to have it suddenly start popping open and be fully open within seconds.

The Common Evening Primrose (Oenothera biennis) is an erect, 2-6 ft. tall biennial wildflower with leafy stems and large, four-petaled yellow flower blossoms about 3″ across. The center of the blossoms has eight stamens, each of which consists of a long, slender filament topped by an anther, which produces the pollen.

The plant is night-flowering – the short-lived blossoms open rapidly just after sunset and then wither and die by the next afternoon. Before the flowers open, the buds are like a furled umbrella. As they open, the outer wrapper peels back, the flower unfurls in a counterclockwise direction, and then the four petals spread out. The plant is a very prolific bloomer, and it seems that the number of new blossoms we see on the plant each morning is about the same as the previous morning.

One evening we saw a hummingbird moth working the newly-opened blossoms and we have seen many bees visiting the blossoms the next morning before they wither. The flowers are often described as fragrant – we notice that the air around the plant is fragrant once the plant starts blooming, but we do not notice that a single blossom is fragrant.

The featured image is a flash exposure of a newly-opened blossom. In the Additional Images gallery below there are images showing a bee visiting the flowers, an overall view of the open blossoms the next morning with some withered blossoms from previous evenings on the ground. There is also a photo of some of the withered blossoms the next afternoon.

In addition to the many photos we took, I took some videos (both time-lapse and real time) and posted two of them on YouTube to share here.

This 20 second video is a time-lapse video of common evening primrose flower blossoms opening. It was shot at 1 frame per second, so the actual elapsed time of the video is 8 minutes.

The video below captures the blossoms of the common evening primrose opening. Nine blossoms open in this 5-¼ minute long video, eight in the first 2-½ minutes.

Additional Images

The colors of the blossoms in some of these images differ because of the type of lighting and the camera used. Some of the evening images are flash exposures and one was taken with my phone’s camera, while others are daylight exposures.