What's The Story, Morning Glories?

YOU MAY NOT WAKE UP BRIGHTEYED with dawn’s early light, but morning glories do, unfurling their peerless, saucer shaped blossoms with the sun’s first kiss.

- Valerie Sudol

In a life brief but intense, each flower lasts only until the heat of midday crumples it, leaving the silken petals wilted and spent. But with each new day, a whole new set of flowers opens and, with a mature vine, it’s a heart-stopping performance by an uncountable multitude.

Morning glory vines go big — 12 to 15 feet — and are dense with heart-shaped foliage. They need a support of some kind to wrap their tendrils around and can completely cover a trellis, fence or tripod of stakes.

I planted some on a 9-foot tall arch spanning my garden gate one year, only to find that the vines built up such a thick dome of foliage I was bending low to enter by midsummer. Learning my lesson, I found it more manageable the following season to train them along the back fence, weaving the vines through the wooden palings.

These are plants from warm climates and, in New Jersey, are strictly annuals, dying back with the first frost. There are two issues we face here: getting morning glories to bloom before warm weather ends and preventing them from becoming a nuisance through self-sown seedlings.