Common Name: EVENING-PRIMROSE FAMILY
Habit: Annual to perennial herb (to tree). Leaf: cauline or basal, alternate, opposite, or whorled, generally simple and toothed (to pinnately compound); stipules 0 or generally deciduous. Inflorescence: spike, raceme, panicle, or flowers 1 in axils; bracted. Flower: generally bisexual, generally radial, often opening at either dawn or dusk; hypanthium generally prolonged beyond ovary (measured from ovary tip to sepal base); sepals 4(2--7); petals 4(2--7, rarely 0), often fading darker; stamens 2 × or = sepals in number, anthers 2-chambered, opening lengthwise, pollen interconnected by threads; ovary inferior, chambers generally as many as sepals (sometimes becoming 1), placentas axile or parietal, ovules 1--many per chamber, style 1, stigma 4-lobed (or lobes as many as sepals), club-shaped, spheric, or hemispheric. Fruit: capsule, loculicidal (sometimes berry or indehiscent and nut-like). Seed: sometimes winged or hair-tufted.
Genera In Family: 22 genera, +- 657 species: worldwide, especially western North America; many cultivated (Clarkia, Epilobium, Fuchsia, Oenothera). Note: Gaura moved to Oenothera. Fuchsia magellanica Lam. naturalized in northern California.
eFlora Treatment Author: Warren L. Wagner & Peter C. Hoch, family description, key to genera, treatment of genera by Warren L. Wagner, except as noted
Scientific Editor: Robert W. Patterson, Bruce G. Baldwin.

Habit: Perennial herb, from thick taproot that may branch in age producing multiple rosettes, stem 0. Leaf: basal, simple, ovate or lanceolate to narrowly elliptic, nearly entire to deeply pinnately lobed. Inflorescence: flowers 1 in axils, erect in bud. Flower: radial, opening at dawn; sepals 4, reflexed separately; petals 4, yellow (or white), unspotted, strongly ultraviolet reflective (non-reflective at base), fading +- purple or +- red; stamens 8, longer ones opposite sepals, anthers attached at base, pollen grains 3-angled except in polyploid taxa (visible with hand lens); ovary chambers 4, stigma hemispheric, generally > anthers and cross-pollinated (or +- = anthers and self-pollinated), sterile projection of ovary persistent with fertile part in fruit, without abscission lines at juncture between hypanthium and fertile part of ovary. Fruit: cylindric-ovoid, +- angled to nearly cylindric, walls generally thin, distended by seeds, tip gradually attenuate into a slender sterile portion (0.4)1.5--18 cm, occasionally persistent for > 1 year, sessile. Seed: in 2 rows per chamber, elongate-ovoid, cylindric to oblong-ellipsoid, pitted or coarsely papillate, giving a shaggy appearance.
Etymology: (Leaves similar to Leontodon taraxacoides) Note: Incl in Camissonia in TJM (1993).
Reference: Wagner et al. 2007 Syst Bot Monogr 83:1--240
Unabridged Reference: Raven 1969 Contr US Natl Herb 37:161--396