This week... Morning glories

The colourful climbing morning glory is ideal planted against a sunny wall or fence

- GRAHAM RICE

MORNING glories, and moonflowers, are mainly summer-flowering M vines for sunny situations that have a continuing succession of large, exotic-looking trumpet-shaped flowers from early or midsummer until the first frosts. The flowers open only for part of the day, unfurling in the morning and closing at night or opening in the evening and into the night.

These plants are mainly annuals, growing, blooming, seeding and dying all in one season, but some may survive two or three years - sometimes more in warmer areas.

The flowers come in a wide range of colours, although not orange or yellow, and, sometimes two or three colours are splashed together in one flower or the flowers have two or three zones in different colours. They are popular with bees and other pollinators.

Morning glories support themselves by twining around their supports and will utilise anything their stems encounter, from chain link fence, to trellis, to mature shrubs and even the bare lower stems of an old vining rose.

Waking in the morning to see the clouds of new flowers on a mature plant of Ipomoea tricolor 'Heavenly Blue' is a real treat.

The same but different

• Dwarf, bushy plants with similar flared flowers, usually in rich blue with a blue-and-yellow throat, are known as convolvulus.
• The aggressive perennial weed with white trumpet-shaped flowers is known as bindweed and looks very similar to morning glory, but is classified as Calystegia.
• The sweet potato, Ipomoea batatas, also fits in here and recent years have seen the introduction of ornamental forms of sweet potatoes.
• Firecracker vine and star glory vine look less like morning glory, but are now classified under Ipomoea.

Two kinds of morning glory