Secrets of the Night-Blooming Songflower

After a month of bookish posts, it’s time for a short, sweet interlude at Quiet Reading. Lately we’ve been honoring the life of short story writer Alice Munro. Over the past weekend, I had family guests, who helped me enjoy cool summer mornings, patio evenings, and seasonal blooms. Today’s post comes in that spirit.

🌼 🌺 🌼

In through the window on the mild air comes a fragrance I loved at my last house. Oenothera biennis (EE-nuh-THEE-ruh bye-EN-nis) grew there in a dense, tall cluster, leaning over the grass with abundant yellow flowers that opened nightly. Oenothera, or evening primrose, drew me out the door early on summer mornings to watch the night insects close the all-night nectar buffet.

In the old house, the tissue between house and garden was very thin. If you had asked me where I lived, indoors or out, I would not have been able to answer. What is a window, what is a door, but a thing to open?

Some years after our move to the larger house, my mother bought a packet of Oenothera seeds and started her own patch. When the flowers opened and faded and made seeds, she sent me home with a few. I dropped some under a bedroom window, facing south, and the rest in a small spot by the front door.

In this post-COVID life, when even the rhythm of breath seems to need a new frequency, I forgot the seeds.

Writing, planning classes, and shuttling teens from here to there, I looked out on the spring weeds flourishing in the grass and the neglected beds and shook my head. Those weeds needed pulling, I thought.

And then, in early June, one of the tall weeds, gangly and unlovely, opened a snug calyx and waved a yellow primrose at me.

Oenothera? What are you doing here?

It took me — oh, who knows how much time — to remember the faint blur of seeds I must have scattered two years before. Eena is biennial.

*

I love her botanical name, Ee-nuh-THEE-ruh. She sounds like an old friend of Scheherazade, maybe the one who guarded the queen’s sleep by day and gave her feedback on her stories.

But the common English name won’t do at all. The so-called evening primrose is anything but prim.

Every evening during the warm weeks of early June, more flowers open than the night before. In through the window comes the massed fragrance of rarefruit and starwine. Nocturnal pollinators arrive in their finery to dance. The moths who come at Eena’s call are nothing like the common grey ones battering themselves against the porch light. These wear scarlet epaulets on their broad wings and wear their antennas high.

When the sun dips low and the heat of the day hangs late, Eena stands with her face turned upward to the solstice moon, opening flower after flower.

I find it impossible to say who gives pale-bright yellow light to whom.

*

Eena runs a juke joint in my weedy garden.

She throws her blossoms open like flying yellow platforms where insects gather and gossip until the gong of morning rings them to the shadows.

To the moths, she is the Night-Blooming Songflower, the lady of secret music heard only by those with wings.

*

I am a day-laborer in the palace of the queens, replenishing the water supply while Eenatheerah, Scheherazade, and the winged courtiers sleep.

Alone with my thoughts in the rising heat of a summer day, I accept my menial place in their order.

Who am I to judge what’s a weed and what’s a flower?

Photo by Ana F on Pexels

Coming Up:

Next week: A vacation post from the archives featuring Oberon, Titania, and midsummer madness from the U.S. Pacific Northwest.

Later in July: Have you ever been enchanted by a book? Start drafting an essay, poem, or story about it now, and watch for guidelines next month for the next community writing project at Quiet Reading.