Dusk bloom clock

The Evening Primrose is a clock. This four-minute video, above, shows how it blooms at the close of a summer’s day. If you watch closely, you’ll see how the bursts of movement seem to beat time twice.

Tomorrow a new flower will blossom and mark this moment once again: the edge of day tipping into night.

I made this video as part of my (fictional) Stereochron Island campaign to promote alternatives to the mechanical clock. Its companion timepiece is the Sheep eye clock.

The Evening Primrose is one of several flowers that open or close at predictable times of day or night. As part of Stereochron Island‘s field studies, I made this sketch of an idealised flower clock, below, inspired by Linnaeus’s mid-18th-century scheme for a clock made of living flowers. (The symbol < means the flower opens at this hour, and > closes. The timings are drawn from old journals, and aren’t to be relied upon.)

Video: Dusk bloom clock (2014). The speed has not been altered.

Image: Horologium Florae (2013)