Plant of the Month: Pink Evening Primrose

Presented by Daniel Adams
July 10, 2023

Botanical name: Oenothera speciosa
Common name(s): Pink Evening Primrose, Showy Evening Primrose, Mexican Evening Primrose, Showy Primrose, Pink Ladies, Buttercups, Pink Buttercups
Family: Onagraceae

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[Daniel] Hi, everyone. I’m Daniel Adams, and I’ll be doing the plant of the month presentation.

This presentation is about Oenothera speciosa. It has a list of common names. Some of the most common ones you’ll hear are Pink Evening Primrose, Showy Primrose, Pink Ladies, Pink Buttercups, and Buttercups. There’s a long list, but those are the ones you’re most likely to encounter. This is a perennial herb, and it’s described as being semi-evergreen, meaning that in rigorous climates the foliage on this plant might behave in a deciduous fashion, and in less rigorous environments, it might maintain its foliage through winter or dry seasons.

This will help you ID it if you ever come across it. It has a very distinct-looking flower with four petals. When it’s fully open, you can see this kind of satellite dish shape that it makes. Its color range is anywhere from dark pink to near white. Sometimes the color can be kind of hybridized, with pink and white going on at the same time. You’ll notice here these red veins that run from the eye of the flower along the length of the petals to the end. In the center, you can see bright yellow stigmas and stamens, and over here on the right, you can see when the flower is closed, you get this more typical rose shape. I find it to be a really distinct-looking flower, and I can almost always identify it on the spot anytime I come across it.

Pink Evening Primrose is a Texas native plant. In reading about it, it’s believed that this plant was initially only native to the central grasslands of the U.S., but over time, it has kind of naturalized itself to these other parts in the South and the East. Pink Evening Primrose is very resilient to water-scarce conditions and it can also survive in a wide range of suitable soil conditions. Again, when looking at this range, that makes a lot of sense. Some of these more water-scarce areas, like in California or Texas, it probably wouldn’t be able to survive so well if it didn’t have that resiliency to drought conditions.

To expand on that, this goes over the pervasiveness and colony structure of Pink Evening Primrose. If you look at these pictures, you can see how it grows almost ubiquitously and in great numbers close to each other. And on the right, this is another primrose. This is actually Yellow Evening Primrose, but I like this picture because it demonstrates the way this will grow along the sides of roads. In the spring and summertime in Texas, this is a really common sight to see them growing so ubiquitously like this.

For anyone who tends to gardens or is interested in making a garden, if you want a garden with a variety, like a variety of flowers, it’s recommended to stay away from Pink Evening Primrose because it has a tendency to push everything else out and be the only thing in your garden. But there are ways to get around it. You can plant Pink Evening Primrose in more rocky and fertile soil from the other things that you’re planting. It will still grow, but it will grow in a more well-behaved fashion, so it doesn’t take over everything else, and then you can have that garden with the variety that you want.

As far as environmental services go, this plant is very attractive to bees, which makes it a key pollinator, which we all know is a really important service in ecosystems. It also serves as a dietary source for birds and some mammals because of these seed capsules that grow along the stem. You can see in this picture this bird is going to town on these, getting some food.

This is a pretty interesting behavioral characteristic of Pink Evening Primrose. In most ranges, the flower will open in the evening, hence the name evening primrose, and then close in the morning. But in more southern ranges, the flower tends to open in the morning instead and close in the evening. So, depending on where you are, you might see different timings for the opening and closing of the Pink Evening Primrose’s flower. I don’t have a video of it—I wish I did—but it is noted that the flower opens and closes fast enough that you can observe it in real-time with the naked eye. Yeah, that’s usually not the case for flowers. Usually, they open quite slowly.

This is some information I came across while reading about Pink Evening Primrose. I was not expecting to see anything about the edibility of it, but here we are. It is the case that you could take the leaves of this plant and use them in a salad because they do have nutritional benefits. Listed here, you can see that it’s a source of vitamin F and some fatty acids. The flower itself is also edible. People will add it to salads as just an aesthetic component, but it is noted that you don’t want to eat too much of this because it is capable of causing a stomachache.

So, that’s going to be it for now. It’s a modest overview of the plant, but I think going forward, you’ll have a really easy time ID’ing it. And if you’re more adventurous than I am, maybe you’ll even add this to your salad.

Thank you.

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