This one can tell the time

The four o'clock flower.

It blooms everyday at four o'clock.

Comes in a variety of colours

- deep pink, white, yellow being the most common -

and can have a mix of different colours on the same flower, sometimes.

Incredibly easy to grow;

probably the first flowering plants that I grew as a child.

I remember we grew a lot of these then

but they were almost always the pink variety.

I remember too how I would wait and watch them unfold,

checking the time to see if it really happened at four o'clock on the dot

or if the flowers had their watches set to different time zone.

When I learned about pollination in school,

I remember coming back home

and trying to cross fertilise the pink and yellow varieties,

- in the hope that the resulting flowers would display a mix of pink and yellow -

then waiting for the seeds to mature.

Even today,

whenever I see these plants,

I always look for the dried black seed left behind when the flower dies.