This week: In Love/Hate with Common Evening Primrose
Hello!
It pains me to admit that I dislike certain native plants, but with a little research, many redeem themselves. This was the case for the unruly Jerusalem Artichoke (a useful food product!) and is also true with this week’s native flower: Common Evening Primrose (Oenothera biennis).
Common Evening Primrose is an eastern native biennial flower with a bad habit: it reseeds freely and has become an invasive plant in other parts of the world. In fact, its seeds are so successful that they appear in nearly every state and province in the U.S. and Canada. Common Evening Primrose loves a dry, sunny habitat, and makes its home in disturbed sites, regularly popping up in fields and ditches. This is not a plant you need to buy—it just shows up.
And, as a seed-throwing biennial, it relocates itself. The first year, it forms a basal rosette and doesn’t flower. In year two, it reaches a spindly 6 feet tall, flowers, produces hundreds of seeds, and dies. The following season, new plants start over as basal rosettes. While Evening Primrose may seem like a perennial, you are instead seeing a combination of plants in the basal rosette and flowering stages growing in proximity year after year.
What's to Like about Common Evening Primrose?
Evening Primrose blooms at night and is pollinated by night-owl moths and early-riser bees. It is also a larval host for the Primrose Moth. Songbirds collect the seeds.
You may be wondering: Other than being pollinator-friendly, why appreciate Common Evening Primrose? Like the aforementioned Jerusalem Artichoke, it was a food source for indigenous Americans like the Iroquois, Cherokee, and Gosiute. The whole plant is edible: leaves, roots, and seeds. Perhaps most importantly, it contains essential omega-6 fatty acids. It was also used medicinally to treat many ailments, from “piles” to laziness. Don’t we all occasionally wish to cure laziness? It is still used in natural medicine, though its efficacy is suspect.
By the way, if you’re looking for a well-behaved, low-growing, night-blooming primrose, give perennial Missouri Evening Primrose a try—same genus, different outcome.
Elsewhere:
This year’s Homegrown National Park’s online auction fundraiser runs from March 6 to the 11th. Some great items and experiences are waiting for your bids! Lot 40, donated by Blooms to Bees, is especially awesome. :)
Have a great week,
Julie