As darkness falls, many flowers quietly fold themselves shut. Nyctinasty, to give the behaviour its botanical name, tends to occur in species that have long-lived flowers, in order to protect their precious pollen and reproductive parts from cold, frost, dew (wet pollen is a heavier burden for pollinators to carry) or herbivores.
In lesser celandine, for example, a native species that is a member of the buttercup family, nocturnal closure protects the flowers against browsing slugs.
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Species vary widely in the precise timing of their opening and closing, depending partly on when their pollinators are active, and flowers pollinated by nocturnal bats or moths tend to close during the day instead.
The 18th-century Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, who is most famous for revolutionising taxonomy with his system of binomial nomenclature (ie ‘scientific’ or ‘Latin’ names), suggested that an arrangement of carefully chosen species could be used as a floral clock for telling the time, though this has proved difficult in practice. SB
