You may be vaguely aware that at one of our “Fairy Gardens,” which are right along Hillside, there was a tall, dead stalk-like stump of a tree in one treebed, around which Ellen had the brilliant idea of planting morning glory seeds. And … just wow! Look at them now! They are truly colorful dynamos of the plant world (see below)! And they do in fact go to sleep in the evening, and wake up to follow the sun across the sky.
I have always been fascinated by morning glories, which were one of the first seeds (possibly THE first seed) I ever grew by myself, from scratch, in a little hanging planter in my bedroom window. They twined upwards so quickly, and grew such beautiful flowers with amazing colors! Later, I learned more about these climbing wonders, and I’m even more entranced: did you realize there are over 1,650 different species of “morning glory” (family: Convolvulaceae)?
Morning glories are native to central and south America, and have always been world travelers, as one would expect of this fast-growing powerhouse of a twining plant which gave us the gift of sweet potatoes. The largest genus within the family is Ipomoea, and this large genus has been selectively bred in Japan since the 8th century CE. As a consequence of this long history, folks from Asia have well developed culinary traditions around morning glories. Ipomoea aquatica, known as water spinach or water morning glory, is widely used as a green vegetable in East and Southeast Asian cuisines, and the genus Ipomoea also includes sweet potatoes, aka “tuberous morning glories,” another popular Asian veggie. And not only sweet potatoes: “at least 62 other species of morning glory also produce these underground organs, some of them as big as those of the sweet potato and many also edible.” (https://phys.org/news/2019-11-story-morning-glory-taxonomy-evolution.html)
Of course, the earliest uses of morning glories were on its native continent. In ancient Mesoamerica, in addition to being used by Aztec priests as hallucinogens, their juice (!) was used to vulcanize rubber! (Vulcanize = hardening rubber by treating it with sulfur, which is what you need to do to make it into, for instance, a rubber ball–yes, early Mesoamerican cultures were the first to use rubber, and the first to create ballgames using bouncy balls!). Because of their fast growth and interesting color development, moreover, scientists have been studying this humble flowering growth dynamo for a long time, and using them as a kind of model genome–Japanese workers in the early 1930’s produced one of the first plant genetic maps using flower color variants of Ipomoea nil. Despite this, even scientists sometimes have not had the grace to acknowledge how fascinating they are (but that seems to be changing).
Morning glories, some of which are the field plants you might hear being called bindweed, are treated as pests, predictably, by some US gardeners and farmers. In my eyes, and maybe also in the eyes of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, this is just whining. Don’t get me wrong–sure, they grow fast, twine around stuff, and make it difficult to mechanically (ahem!) harvest more commercial crops like corn and such. Haters gonna hate: there’s actually a US national ban on “imported” water spinach (Ipomoea aquatica) seeds, although not all states agree (thank you, Terry Johnson of Georgia, and Texas, at least till now–but maybe not for much longer, since there’s a bill in the Texas legislature proposing to ban morning glories and mountain laurel as “non-native” to Texas, oh brother where do I begin?).
But it’s worthwhile considering that morning glories may in fact be a family of genetically superior beings, showing us a pathway to a non-pesticide future. Some morning glories are resistant to glyphosate (weed-killer)–and those are, unexpectedly to researchers, the very ones that are most resistant to insect damage (https://news.umich.edu/whats-the-story-morning-glory/).
