A Morning Glory, Morning.

 Face it…there is nothing quite like sublime blue hue of morning glories. OK, maybe the color of meconopsis, but true blue is rare in the plant world, as it is in nature, but for less than the price of a cup of coffee at McDonald’s, ( if I drank coffee from McDonald’s), anyone can have true blue flowers, grown from seed, in just a couple of months. These seeds were planted in late May, and they literally do little of anything until the end of August, when they take off in the late summer heat. Flower buds form late as the day length shortens, and even two weeks ago, the bud count on my vines growing in the greenhouse were few and far between. But today? There are massive clusters of buds, they always seem to form just before our first frost, which can happen any day now.

There are so many ways to grow morning glories. I used a transparent netting on the greenhouse, which was designed for cucumbers, but vines also can be grown in a pot, or allowed to crawl over shrubs and bushes, which is how they grow in the wild. The foliage will adjust itself to be rather horizontal in nature, so the effect is always pleasing. Formal plantings work well too, some very stylish gardens can be made with a grid system of bamboo or wire, where the fast growing vines can create faux walls or garden rooms with foliage walls. Just remember, they grow slow at first, and then explode near the end of the season. I would like to cover a barn wall with mesh netting, and then plant 50 seeds to create a green wall.