Desert Four-o'clock (Mirabilis multiflora)

   

Desert Four-o'clock. Photograph by Wynn Anderson.

• Common English Names: Desert Four-o'clock, Giant Four-o'clock, Colorado Four-o'clock
• Common Spanish Names: Maravilla
• Scientific Name: Mirabilis multiflora
• Family: Nyctaginaceae (Four-o'Clock Family)
• Geographic Range: Found from desert scrub and grasslands to upland foothill woodlands of pinyon, oak, and juniper in Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and western Texas, south to central Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and central San Luis Potosí, Mexico.
• Description: Coarse, herbaceous, branching plant, often clumping with age, with stout, leafy, erect or ascending stems, and thick, carrot-like, pithy roots. Showy campanulate flowers in calyx-like involucres of 6-8 buds, opening successively with 2-inch long flaring perianth tubes, rose to purplish-red in color.
• Landscape Usage: A useful ground-covering perennial, plants often commercially available, but easily grown from seed in well-draining soil, full sun or part shade. Root hardy, the plant dies to the ground at first frost but returns vigorously from a tuberous root in late spring.
• Ethnobotany: Alleged to contain medically useful compounds for stomach complaints, both as purgative and as an appetite suppressant, as well as a topical inflammatory. Hopi reportedly used the plant for divination purposes. Warning: Mirabilis are known to contain alkaloids which are toxic in quantity.
• Notes: Essentially a nocturnally flowering plant, the blossoms open in late afternoon and remain open through most of the following day, thus are attractive to both insect pollinators (moths) and hummingbirds. It is often confused with M. jalapa, a widely used South American ornamental species that sometimes escapes gardens and naturalizes in sub-tropical areas.

Last Update: 2 Oct 2013