A volunteer at the neighborhood botanical gardens gave us a few seeds for moon flower plants, and we have two that have thrived. The plant is in the morning glory family, and produces large white flowers that bloom at night and then wither when the sun comes up.
Yesterday, the sky was cloudy, and there was a light rain, so the first bloom of the year appeared when there was still sufficient light to take a picture.
These flowers are very popular with the huge Luna moth.
Exquisite! Too bad they bloom at night. My Aunt E in Pennsylvavia had these when I was a kid. They were fascinating.
ReplyDeleteI used to plant moonflowers with my morning glories. Another night-blooming plant is the evening primrose, which is a weed around here. I loved to go out just as it was getting dark and watch the big yellow blooms pop open. The only problem with the evening primrose is that it's a biennial, so the first year it's just a low-growing weed, and only in the second year does it get tall and bloom.
ReplyDeleteI have the larger moon flower plant variety, about 3ft tall with large blooms, flowers about dinner time, lasts until mid morning the next day.
ReplyDeleteJust the mention of morning glories brings back a bad case of PTSD for me. When I was a kid, before herbicides that controlled them, they were a nightmare weed in our soybean fields!
ReplyDeleteViney bastards!
tom: I think that's the kind we had growing by the side of our house in Fairfax, Va.
ReplyDeleteRebeccaH: Planting morning bloomers and night bloomers together is a great idea.
R-man: I can see how that might have been a mess. Kind of O/T, but when I was growing up, and would visit my grandparents in rural Stanly county, I saw signs all over the place advertising treatments for nematodes. I had no idea what nematodes were at the time, but they seemed to be such a menace I sure didn't want to get any on me.
Roundworms, wear shoes you're pretty safe.
ReplyDeleteMakes sense though, rural areas in the 60s and 70s still had lots of kids running around barefoot.
Did you see that NC's supreme court decided the legislature isn't legitimate so they can't amend NC's Constitution?
Veeshir
Lovely!
ReplyDeleteV: Didn't see that about the NC Supreme Court. NC has a tendency to disappoint me, politically. For example, both of our Republican senators are RINO idiots.
ReplyDelete