A while ago, Carol over at May Dreams Gardens asked a question in one of her posts. Specifically, she asked if there were other gardeners out there who had conceived of specific plant dislikes, plants they would NEVER plant in their gardens.
At that time, I responded rather decidedly that violets were something I would never plant on purpose. In fact, I have some regrets about planting violets, as they are very invasive and when they invade an area they successfully kill most everything around them.
I have been engaged in a great eradication program the last couple of days, and it came to me as I was doing it that this is another plant that I would never plant in my garden again. Specifically, it is the Showy Evening Primrose, (Oenothera speciosa) , which opens any time, not just in the evening. See the wash of pink around the irises in this bed? Isn’t it lovely?
This is a direct quote from the comments section of the Audubon Society “Field Guide to North American Wildflowers (eastern ed.)”:
A hardy and drought resisitant species that can form colonies of considerable size. The flowers may be as small as 1″ wide under drought conditions. The plant is frequently grown in gardens and escapes from cultivation. The flowers of some members of the genus open in the evening so rapidly that the movement can almost be observed.
Read that statement. I did, when someone gave me a start of this plant. I focused on the part about “hardy and drought resistant”, and didn’t think about the implications of “colonies of considerable size” and “escaping from cultivation”.
Now, think about this. If it makes colonies of considerable size, certainly that means that it has some way of spreading successfully, right? And if it frequently escapes from cultivation, surely that should be taken as a warning, correct? Needless to say, a plant that is “hardy and drought tolerant” may be quite successful in a site where it has escaped from cultivation.
Boy oh howdy, is this ever true. I have had people ask me for a start of this plant when they have seen it in full bloom in my front garden. I look at them and tell them that if they plant it, and it is transplanted successfully, they had better REALLY want it, because once it gets started they will REALLY have it.
I would counsel any person who contemplates this absolutely gorgeous flower in a pot in any garden center to think about what it will be like when the garden bed they plant it in has nothing else in it. Look at this picture of my front garden. I love the way the primrose has painted a big pink swath at the foot of the redbud tree. It is actually quite beautiful.
There is only one problem. When I began pulling it out today, the swath of primrose had grown to over twice the size it is in that picture. It did this expansion in ONE season. ONE! It was killing the wormwood at the corner of the walk (if you can believe that! Killing wormwood, a highly successful thug plant!), has smothered the sedum that was under there, was quietly strangling all the day lilies that are in the right side of this shot. Back in the middle, the section of primroses there had almost completely killed my miniature rose, the lavender, was working on beginning strangulation of the peony.
I have gotten into this eradication program just in time.
Look into this ethereally beautiful face. If you have a sunny bank that needs populating, somewhere where you don’t intend to put anything else, someplace that needs protection from erosion; by all means populate it with Showy evening primrose. You will not be unhappy. They bloom profusely in the spring, have very nice green foliage all summer, rebloom when it cools off in the fall, and the foliage is a striking scarlet when it finally gets hit by frost.
But it has serious rhizomes that creep under and through all the roots of other plants, strangling them from beneath. The root system becomes so thick, nothing else can get any water or nutrients. From above, the plants get tall, and covered with thick leaves. They lean over their neighbors, and smother them from above while the insidious rhizomes strangle them from beneath.
Would I ever plant this again? Not in a flower bed where I wanted anything else tender and beautiful that needs nurturing to grow. Out in the wildflower strip where the other natives have the proper defences and ammunition to fight it off? Yes indeed. I would put it in a prairie restoration as well, in its own native habitat.
Gardeners beware! Be careful what you ask for, you might just get it! Oenothera speciosa is the thug plant to beat all thug plants.
Plant it at your own risk.
Indeed, plant at your own risk. I stopped someone from buying this at a local garden center earlier in the spring. I considered it my very good deed for the day.
Carol at May Dreams Gardens
Sounds like you got it out just in time to save your tree! I always admire it wherever I see it, but I know better than to bring it home. Although your post advises against Oenothera, your photos say “Buy Me.”
I wonder if deer eat it. If not perfect for my back yard. Having a herd of deer pass through your yard every day does nothing good for the landscape especially this time of the year when the fawns will try anything and everything.
It looks lovely on the roadsides with other spring wildflowers, but luckily someone warned me long ago about its takeover tendencies, Healingmagichands, so I just admire it from the car window.
I have a list of deer resistent plants via the Wildflower Center – this one doesn’t appear on it.
Annie at the Transplantable Rose
I know, I feel bad taking it all out when it was so beautiful this spring. But I really do want other things in there. I honestly don’t think the redbud was in any danger, it has pretty deep roots and the primrose really sends hers only about 5 or 6 inches down.
What I couldn’t tolerate was the demise of my beautiful day lilies, to which I am addicted.
I just went through a lot of sites looking at lists of deer resistant plants. But I also went to sites that were listing all sorts of garden plants, and categorizing them as “rarely damaged”. “sometimes damaged” and “Severely damaged.” Primroses don’t show up on any of them. Is this because gardeners are getting wise to it and not planting it much? Anyway, I have had plenty of deer around here browsing, and their favorite thing here is the violets. I have never caught them eating evening primrose, so maybe it would be deer resistant. It is certainly worth a try, and if you want some I have tons of it lying around waiting to be ground up in the compost grinder.
I made the mistake of planting Oenothera biennis in my garden a few years ago. To my chagrin, I grew the original plants from seed and planted them in drifts across my borders.
BIG mistake.
The rosette of leaves which the plant forms smother everything around them and they take over.
As a plant they’re not really that interesting either.
I’ve just about eradicated the dreaded evening primrose now – but every so often I still find one sneaking in somewhere as dormant seeds burst into action.
This year the hollyhocks seem to be making a bid to take over the garden but I don’t mind since they’re so beautiful and, having a vertical habit and less dense leaf system, still leave room for everything else.
When I’m deadheading, I scatter the hollyhock seeds all over the place, reckoning I can always yank out anything that decides to grow in an inconvenient spot.
Isn’t it interesting how one can look at one’s garden from year to year and think – “oh yes, that was the year of the whatever”?
A sign of how a garden changes all the time, I suppose.
For me this year it’s definitely hollyhocks and Acanthus mollis.
Oh, yes. One year I had the year of the cleomes. At least they are an annual.
What gets me is that the oenothera which was taking over the garden does not do the same thing out in the wild. I guess that the other residents of the ditches are better at fighting back.
Cleomws are nice, but I have reached the point where, except for my lady Banjs and Old Blush Rose’s, I don’t want ANYTHING but natives! Mom Nature put on this property what needs to be ther. ( Though I suppos I could do with a bit fewer Ashe Junipers on the back 2 acres! Those things are not attractive! But-the birds like them for nesting – so ….
Thanks so much for being here! I came in from the garden to check on whether the very much spread plants in my small garden were a weed or the evening primrose I planted in the spring. Judging from your pictures, I’m thinking it is.
I will be tearing that baby out immediately, as the other lovelys that share the area are peony, daylily, sedum and coreopsis–not willing to sacrifice anybody for the primrose! Thanks AGAIN!
See, actually — they are both what you planted and a weed. . .
That being said, I have judiciously decided that there is a place in my new stroll garden for the evening primrose, but it is under the poplar tree and there is nothing else I want to plant there. The birds insist on planting poke, blackberries, cherry trees, mulberry trees, and poison ivy over there and I am thinking that the primrose will crowd them out. also, there is nowhere easy for it to spread from that place. We shall see. If I decide it is a problem there, it will be easy to dig it out.
I came across this site while looking for something I can plant in my ditch next spring to help control the Weeds so I don’t have to get in there and weed eat the ditch’s. My health is getting bad and it’s getting to much for me to go out every week and maintain the ditch. Any Suggestions?
My immediate impulse is to ask where is the ditch and why do you feel like it needs to be weed eaten? Why not just let the stuff that wants to grow there grow? But that is the lazy gardener’s response, and the truth is I don’t really have any good ideas. You could try planting something that stays low and doesn’t need to be cut, like vinca or sheep fescue or buffalo grass.
Is the only way to eradicate it, manual digging? I have been told Roundup didn’t have much effect.
as far as I can see, pulling it all up while getting as much of the root as possible and then being quite vigilant and pulling up any new volunteers works quite well. I wouldn’t know about roundup since we are organic gardeners and don’t use it.
Wow – I was given a pill bottle full of these seeds & was going to plant this in a=my medicinal herb/flower garden. Not so now! Thanks for the warning article…
Had to add my two cents. I agree wholeheartedly that I will never plant this plant again – beautiful as it is. I was literally shocked at how prolific it was. It only lasted one growing season in my garden after I planted it where i was desperate to dig it out and I was vigilant about doing so. It didn’t have a chance to kill anything else. Phew! I was just researching if the yellow variety is any different???
My neighbor wants the yellow one badly. I gave her my opinion but it’s going to be a case of ‘live and learn’. When it happens, I’ll be thinking (not saying) ‘told ya so!’
There are several varieties of yellow evening primrose, and in my experience the Missouri evening primrose is hardly even invasive at all.
We are facing a similar problem in our front bed. We just pulled/dug out all the primrose shoots we could find that were coming up. Felt good that we were able to weed early in the season and then mulched. That was about two weeks ago. Today I looked out and there are primrose shoots everywhere popping up through the mulch. We had pulled the seedlings with the roots but they are still going strong! It’s also really hard to get at the ones that are now interspersed with perennials now coming up. Did you weed to contain it and keep it within bounds or did you go after to try to get it completely out of your beds? Just trying to figure out what to do. I met a woman last summer at a local master garderners program with one of our public libraries and she said they eventually gave up and completely gutted the bed and started over. Interested in eradication experiences/ideas on this. No chemicals just wondering how difficult this is going to be. We’ve had them planted in the bed now for about 3-4 years. Thanks!
I found that if I went out there every day or so and pulled every shoot I could find I eventually starved the rhizomes out. Even so, a couple of years after I thought I had them all out of the front bed I found a spot where they had popped up again hiding in the siberian irises. But I was able to discourage that little patch pretty quickly.
I never did use chemicals, and I did not gut the beds. But I did have to pull shoots for most of a summer.
Thank you so much for this perspective. We will hang in there and keep pulling!
Another one you don’t want to start is Chameleon Plant. It takes over as well killing out everything. Pretty leaf, but watch out!
Yep I am there…were you are, big mistake and now the even bigger question “HOW DO i GET RID OF IT?”
Dig it out and then keep pulling up the shoots that come up from the rhizomes and eventually it will die out. Takes about two years of attentive pulling. If you don’t allow the shoots to feed the roots, they really do quit after a while.
Oh dear. I too have a problem with primroses. For the past two years I hired a “Master Gardener” who put in more plants in all the flower beds. This spring I noticed for the first time a 3 foot wide cluster prolific pink blossoms cropping up at the furthest end of my largest flower bed. Oh no, I thought, the MG must have planted them, even though I told her “no pink in the blue bed”. What kind of plant is that anyway, I wondered? So I did some investigating and discovered that those pretty pink flowers were none other than the highly invasive, vigorous Mexican primrose! Why on earth would the MG have planted those murderers in my flower bed? Doesn’t she know better – or was it sabotage?!
Well, within just a few days that first crop of primrose had spread across the flower bed like wildfire, creating 3 large swaths, each 6 feet wide and growing! Then when the mature plants from prior years did not come up where they used to be, I knew that something must be terribly wrong. In fact, there were no other plants at all in the areas where the primrose had taken over, having ruthlessly strangulated everything in its path. I asked my (new) gardeners to remove absolutely all of the pink primrose. When I checked they had only yanked up a few handfuls and left the rest, claiming they “didn’t think it was a weed.” Hello, anything that takes over a garden bed and kills everything in sight is a weed by any name.
After all that, you guessed it, for the past week I have been pulling up the primrose myself. Now that I have removed most of it (if that is ever possible), I can see the full extent of the damage. That lethal killer weed has stripped the bed of all the plants within three adjoining sections, each 6 x 9 feet, leaving nothing but bare dirt (and, I suspect, more primrose taproots lurking menacingly underground.) Now I am on primrose patrol to root out all of it before I go back to the garden shop and replace all the missing plants. Thank goodness the killer did not smother all the plants in the bed!
Needless to say, I am not letting that “Master Gardener” anywhere near my gardens ever again. I could use some help around here, though. Gardening is a huge job and I truly respect those who know what they are doing. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and your kind help on this most informative site!!
Before you go getting too mad at your Master Gardener, be aware that birds are perfectly happy to plant primroses for you… It could have been a stray seed that got well started before you realized what was happening. I’m not saying the plant wasn’t put in there, garden centers are happy to sell this hardy perennial…. And boy oh howdy is it ever hardy!!
Another one you should be wary of is the orange trumpet vine….
oh how happy i am that i found your site. i got the primrose couple of days ago at local garden center. the lady that dold it to me did not say anything about it being invasive, so today i was all ready to put it in the ground. somehow i forgot its name so i could not get any info on internet, how i usually do, but i just decided to plant it either way. i had several other plants to plant as well and somehow i could not make up my mind where to put it. so somehow i ended up leaving it to plant it somewhere tomorrow. instead i was looking through perennial plants list on internet and primrose name sounded familiar. so now i am wondering what to do with it. will it kill hosta? i have an area with several hostas around wild apple tree where one of my dogs loves to pee, slowly killing hostas, maybe if i plant it there they would prevent my dogs pee kill the hostas…other place is poison ivy patch in my backyard, but that is kinda woody…hmm…
If you are going to plant it, find somewhere that is away from plants it might invade. I actually do have some primroses on the property. They are planted in the labyrinth, which gets mowed on a regular basis. In that location they have lots of competition from grass, and they do not wander far. If you give them good soil, they will take full advantage of it. I believe that they could probably kill hostas just as well as any other plant, although around here the hostas are in the shade and I have never put primroses with them.
Just be aware that they can travel a very long way underground. And they are VERY hardy.
I have been looking for the missori pink primrose that I planted years ago and which a few plants crop up once in a while around the edge os mt creeping yews. They look lovely mixed in with the yews. My question is will they kill the yews and are they the same as your species? I have a very steep hill that I have planted with the yews, ornamental grass and dogwood.
I wonder if they can take over ditch lilies (aka tiger lilies). I have a fairly steep bluff/cliff that needs erosion control. There is some crown vetch and there will be some ditch lilies. It’s just been redug and has bare soil. There is nothing else there except grass, some bird planted rose of sharon and some wild roses. This might just be exactly what I am looking for, since everything around it will be mowed and there isn’t a flower bed within 200′.
I think that the location you describe would be quite right for the primroses, since there isn’t any garden area nearby they can invade. The mowing will help control them. You may find them living in the lawn as very short plants, but I doubt they will get to the flower beds from there.
Oh, and my NEVER plant it list is: Lily of the valley (unless, like primrose, you mean for it to be the only thing for quite a distance) and Japanese Quince (it has thorns AND it spreads via root sucker for at least 15′ if not 20′-I have one I inheritated with my house and I *hate* it-I cut at least 20-30 suckers every WEEK during the growing season and they will come right back up. I can’t bring myself to remove the “momma” shrub because it blooms so early and the hummers and orioles love the nector-BUT never, ever, ever would I plant one on purpose, except possibly as a stand alone that was at least 50′ from a garden with mowed grass surrounding it).
Someone asked about the yellow primrose. I have some, it was given to me as “sundrops”. They do spread, but not quickly. My small bunch was maybe 5-6″ wide 3 years ago and is now maybe 12″ wide. Bees LOVE them, last spring when they flowered every flower had a honeybee or other bee, some had more than one! BTW I am zone 6/NY.
Oh, I agree totally about lily of the valley. I had some that was killing my hostas from beneath… Nasty stuff and hard to get rid of, but I managed it.
The sundrops primroses are a lot easier to control. I have them in several places and I don’t have nearly the trouble with them that I have with the showy evening primrose.
Thank you for publishing this article!! I sincerely appreciate it. I just planted a flat two weeks ago in my front yard near my beloved grape vines not knowing how much of a thug plant they are. I had 6 flats on order and planned to pick them up from the nursery tomorrow and plant them the next day. I am canceling the order and digging up the ones I planted asap.
Well, you are welcome! In all honesty, though, I think that grapevines could probably compete successfully with this plant, since they put their roots down deep into the sub soil and grow high enough to avoid being smothered. But the escape factor is certainly an issue.
Thank you so very much for your info!! I planted this evening primrose last spring & it seemed to die by fall. This spring shoots were all over & I thought an invasive weed had invaded my garden. A friend advised it was that Primrose. It’s just awful how it has spread & I’m worried how I can stop it. Thank you for your insight. I will be 9ut there Daily pulling it up!!!!😭
Know this is an old post, but so glad I stumbled upon it. I bought one of these for my flower bed a couple weeks ago, and it is so lovely and full of blossoms… I bought 3 more today.
However, I do happen to have 4 small raised boxes desperately in need of something to “take over”, so they should do wonderfully there – and be completely contained.
I’m grabbing my gloves to go dig that first one up now, though! Thank you for the warning. 🙂
Hmm, I have this kind but she’s a potted plant (and more of a houseplant, she’s only outside for her sunshine). Perhaps, as far as gardening goes, they are to be kept as a potted plant or in a potted garden of some kind.
In terms of aggressiveness, well, my morning glories beg to differ, as those are a vine plant and they’ve devoured my porch light a few times (still looking for a trellis to make them not do that). Of, course, I doubt the twighlight primrose would that aggressive in Ohio but I wouldn’t know either way (Lowe’s says it’s a Zone 5, Ohio is Zone 6).