I WONDER whether the Evening Primrose is as much grown and cared for as it deserves to be. It is an American plant, but is now found wild in several parts of England, notably at Formby, among the Lancashire sand hills, where tradition says it originally came from a vessel wrecked on that barren coast. It is mentioned little, if at all, by our old botanists, and our more modern poets have for the most part passed it carelessly by. Southey, however, alludes to it in his well-remembered lines to the bee, that was still at work, after the Cistus flowers had fallen and “the Primrose of Evening was ready to burst.” Keats, too, has a striking passage about the Evening Primrose, which I quote a little further on, for I may perhaps make a few extracts from an article I lately wrote in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ on “The Garden at Nightfall,” as I have no better words in which to describe the beauty and charm of these Œnotheras. The question arising from the veins of flowers I have already mentioned in _The English Flower Garden_. “I have two varieties of Œnotheras or Evening Primroses, and they are in their full glory to-night. One is the large flowering yellow Œnothera, which grows from five to six feet high, and which opens its yellow blossoms night after night from early summer to late autumn. It is a curious sight to see the blossoms begin to open. I had been in the garden shortly after six, and the yellow buds were still folded within the calyx. Watching closely, you saw the petals give a sudden start—they half release themselves—and by degrees open out fully into the blossom, which will last till morning, but begins to fade after the sun has dried up the dews of night. Keats, whose accurate observation of flowers is often very remarkable, speaks of ‘A tuft of evening primroses O’er which the mind may hover till it dozes; O’er which it well might take a pleasant sleep But that ’tis _ever startled by the leap Of buds into ripe flowers_.’