04-04-2025
- General
- Wall Street Journal
‘Flower Day' Review: Counting the Hours, Bloom by Bloom
In my neck of the woods, the eaves have finished dripping and long chilly evenings of poring over seed catalogs have prepared the ground for firmer plans. Gardeners will appreciate something new to read during their breaks from weeding. Sandra Knapp's 'Flower Day,' evocatively illustrated in black and white by Katie Scott, describes 24 flowers, one for each hour.
'Flower Day' begins at midnight, with an exploration of one of my own favorites: the twining white moonflower, whose high-sugar nectar attracts night-flying moths. Ms. Knapp reveals that moonflower nectar was an important component of Mesoamerican rubber hundreds of years before rubber's 'supposed invention' by 19th-century scientists. At 4 a.m. she offers blue-flowered chicory because, she tells us, that's when it opens in midsummer in Uppsala, where the great Swedish botanist and taxonomist Carl Linnaeus suggested it could be used to tell the time. Imported to the New World, this cousin of lettuce is famous for the bitter note its root imparts to coffee.
Have your coffee at 9 a.m. if you want to investigate that hour's selection, Helianthus annuus—the common sunflower, which is really a composite of many little flowers, each eventually producing a single oily seed. The young sunflower is heliotropic: It turns toward the sun, pointing east in the morning and west by the evening. 'A sped-up video would show them seemingly waving at us,' Ms. Knapp notes. As their stems mature, helianthuses stop tracking the sun—they stay pointing east, optimizing morning visits from pollinators.
Midafternoon offers four-o'clocks, of course—the brilliantly colored South American flower that opens toward the end of the day's heat and stays open for business all night. Many night-bloomers are white, but the bright pink, yellow and red hues of four-o'clocks increase their desirability to those pollinators that 'can perceive a greater range of light,' especially moths. Ms. Knapp includes plenty of less familiar plants—New Zealand flax (used for cloth, but no relation to European Linum), the Amazonian giant waterlily that traps pollinating beetles inside its petals, the inch-high Antarctic hair grass that reproduces both sexually and asexually—all described and investigated for both plant amateurs and the botanically knowledgeable.
