Morning glories
Aug 17th, 2007 by Julie Kirkwood
One of the things I love about gardening is that everybody’s garden plot is unique … and yet somehow we end up having the same problems!
Here’s an e-mail I received this week that describes a problem remarkably similar to the one I had at my house last year.
My name is Arletta Fairfield, and I live in Wisconsin, near a little town called Adams Friendship. I have grown morning glories for several years now, plant them in the spring, usually on an arbor, and I have beautiful flowers by late June. This year I can’t figure out whats going on with “my hooligans” as I call them, I only planted 3 plants on each end of the arbor, they came up beautifully and started growing like crazy. My whole arbor is completely engulfed in heart shaped leaves and big thick vines, but not one single bud on any of them. The vines are still growing, with feelers whipping around everywhere, just waiting for some unsuspecting person to come along, and they will jump on them, they actually look kind of spooky. Why didn’t they bud this year, is it something I did or didn’t do? We are going to take the vine’s down, because the weight of them is not good for the poor arbor. If you have any suggestions, I would love hearing from you, in regards to my “hooligans”
My morning glories overran my front entrance last summer, all stemming from only four seeds in the ground. They were loaded with foliage and vines, yet they hardly produced any flowers.
My guess at the time was that the soil was too fertile. The seeds were planted in garden beds that had a good six inches of compost on top. I planted seeds in another location, with much poorer soil, and they were like a different species. They grew to only a fraction of the size and yet produced about the same number of flowers.
Sadly, I don’t seem to have any pictures of my morning glories when they were in their glory. All I have is this photo of them after the first frost, when they died.
But to relive the moment, here’s my Yard Dirt column from Aug. 23, 2006 about my adventure:
Invasion of the morning glories
By Julie Kirkwood
I’m frightened. My morning glory vines have climbed all the way up the railings on my front steps and, this week, touched the front door.
A twist of tendrils hover over the doorbell and the tips of one vine curled around the doorway like fingers trying to slip inside. If you don’t hear from me again, you’ll know what happened. The morning glories have come to get me.
This morning glory situation has been a lesson in one of quirky things about gardening. If the soil is too fertile, morning glories grow tall and leafy but they fail to produce flowers. If the soil is not fertile enough, the plants don’t grow as big and, at least in my yard, they still fail to produce flowers.
In May, I planted about 50 seeds at the base of the beams holding up the back deck, hoping the fast-growing vines would form a flowery screen. Each beam now has a tangle of vines and leaves clinging to its foot, but it’s certainly not a screen and I have yet to see a single bud of a flower.
The four seeds I planted near the front steps, two on either side, were an afterthought. They climbed the black metal railing with a vengeance, though, apparently fueled by the 6-inch-deep compost on top of the soil where they were planted.
Until the last week or so, the vines looked pretty. Now they’re scary.
Giant heart-shaped leaves cover the railing completely, and now tendrils reach out blindly in all directions for something new to grab.
Some are stretching for the siding on the house. A tendril from each railing stretched across the surface of the bottom step, where they clasped in the middle. Several lean inward and grasp at human victims, including a candidate for state representative who rang the doorbell this weekend. She withstood the attack valiantly, asking casually if they were bean plants, but her campaign staffer stayed at the bottom of the steps, looking wary.
I’m afraid this is only going to get worse.
I planted the morning glory seeds without much thought because, in my naivete, I assumed “annual” means what it says: that you will have the plant for one year and then it goes away.
Apparently this is not the case. Morning glories drop seed packets that grow new plants the following year. These fast-growing vines can become invasive, even though they don’t survive the winter.
That’s just great. And now, as I look into this a little more, I’m reminded that morning glories can be poisonous. There is at least one account circulating the Internet of a woman who got a terrible migraine headache after chopping down morning glory vines and getting the sap all over herself. It’s a good thing I saw that before I let my husband use a machete to cut a path to the front door.
But how many days do we have before the vines crisscross the stairway like caution tape, sneak into the cracks at the front door and punch their little green tendrils through the glass? Who will hear us scream when they slip down the hallway and choke us in our sleep? What if I die before I find out which plants have white flowers and which have blue?
Please be careful if you join the search party to come find us. Use the garage door, not the front. And please, please don’t eat the morning glory seeds. You’ll get a killer headache.
