Evening primrose oil, used as a food supplement for its purported medicinal properties.[31]
[size=75]From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [/size]
About 125, including:
Oenothera acaulis
Oenothera albicaulis
Oenothera argillicola
Oenothera biennis
Oenothera brachycarpa
Oenothera caespitosa
Oenothera californica
Oenothera coronopifolia
Oenothera coryi
Oenothera deltoides
Oenothera drummondii
Oenothera elata
Oenothera erythrosepala
Oenothera flava
Oenothera fruticosa
Oenothera glazioviana
Oenothera hookeri
Oenothera jamesii
Oenothera kunthiana
Oenothera laciniata
Oenothera longissima
Oenothera macrocarpa
Oenothera missouriensis
Oenothera nuttallii
Oenothera odorata
Oenothera pallida
Oenothera perennis
Oenothera pilosella
Oenothera primiveris
Oenothera rhombipetala
Oenothera rosea
Oenothera speciosa
Oenothera stubbei
Oenothera taraxacoides
Oenothera tetraptera
Oenothera triloba
Oenothera is a genus of about 125 species of annual, biennial and perennial herbaceous flowering plants, native to North and South America. It is the type genus of the family Onagraceae. Common names include evening primrose, suncups, and sundrops.
The species vary in size from small alpine plants 10 cm tall (e.g. O. acaulis from Chile), to vigorous lowland species growing to 3 m (e.g. O. stubbei from Mexico). The leaves form a basal rosette at ground level and spiral up to the flowering stems; the leaves are dentate or deeply lobed (pinnatifid). The flowers open in the evening, hence the name “evening primrose”, and are yellow in most species but white, purple, pink or red in a few; there are four petals. One of the most distinctive features of the flower is the stigma with four branches, forming an X shape.[1] Pollination is by Lepidoptera (moths) and bees; like many members of the Onagraceae, however, the pollen grains are loosely held together by viscin threads (see photo below), meaning that only bees that are morphologically specialized to gather this pollen can effectively pollinate the flowers (it cannot be held effectively in a typical bee scopa). Furthermore, the flowers are open at a time when most bee species are inactive, so the bees which visit Oenothera are also compelled to be vespertine temporal specialists. The seeds ripen from late summer to fall.
Oenothera species are used as food plants by the larvae of some Lepidoptera species including Schinia felicitata and Schinia florida, both of which feed exclusively on the genus, the former exclusively on O. deltoides.
In the wild, evening primrose act as primary colonizers, springing up wherever a patch of bare, undisturbed ground may be found. This means that they tend to be found in poorer environments such as dunes, roadsides, railway embankments and wasteland. It often occurs as a casual, eventually being out-competed by other species.
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The genus Oenothera may have originated in Mexico and Central America. During the Pleistocene era a succession of ice ages swept down across North America, with intervening warm periods. This was repeated for four ice ages, with four separate waves of colonization, each hybridizing with the remnants of the previous waves. This generated a present-day population that is very rich in genetic diversity, spread right across the North American continent.
It was originally assigned to the genus Onagra, which gave the family Onagraceae its name. Onagra (meaning “(food of) onager”) was first used in botany in 1587, and in English in Philip Miller’s 1754 Gardeners Dictionary: Abridged. Its modern name Oenothera was published by Carolus Linnaeus in his Systema Naturae. William Baird suggests that since oeno means “wine” in Greek it refers to the fact that the root of the edible Oenothera biennis was used as a wine flavor additive.[citation needed]