Morning Glory is one of my favorite plants to grow because it is almost impossible to kill. They have beautiful blooms in pink, blue, magenta, or white that attract pollinators like hummingbirds and bees. Morning Glories can grow up trellises or railings, making a beautiful, functional and cooling addition to your garden.
In 2010 when I began my gardening journey on a ranch in Dripping Springs, Texas I was gifted an aloe vera plant. I still have the babies of that plant with me today. After relocating to my own farm property, I discovered that morning glory was growing all around the back patio. It was amazing on hot summer days to sit in the shade surrounded by these vines and their beautiful flowers. They attracted helpful friends to the garden and made me smile every morning as I walked outside to tend to our chickens.
When our landlord decided to sell the property, I transplanted a few morning glory vines into a pot and took it to our next home, an apartment. For 18 months these flowers continued to brighten my day from our balcony patio garden. When we moved into our converted school bus I didn’t think twice about taking this potted plant with us. Now these flowers have attracted pollinators to gardens all over Texas, because we planted a garden in at least 6 different places while living in our converted school bus.
Morning glories are great at self seeding. I have literally done nothing to help this plant reseed year after year, and it just keeps coming back (we are now going on a decade!). Currently, our neighbors have morning glory vines that are spilling over our fence and climbing our trees! Theirs has a beautiful vibrant blue bloom and I am very excited to capture some seeds and start a new variety of this beautiful plant. I decided this year I am going to collect some of the seeds so I can start a few more pots. When we buy our dream property, I can have heirloom morning glory ready to beautify our surroundings.
Morning glories have heart-shaped leaves which makes me smile every time I walk by. Interestingly enough, I have discovered that I have misidentified another plant as morning glory several times. In this photo below you can see that both myself and my friends thought this impostor was morning glory!
So the important thing to note is that these impostors have arrowhead-shaped leaves, NOT heart-shaped leaves, and their leaves and flowers are much smaller. I read a lot of great information about how to tell the difference here.
Morning glory seeds can be toxic in high amounts, but there are some schools of thought that their seeds are in fact medicinal. You can read about that here.
Here are some more easy gardening tips:
- Dandelion Jelly Recipe: How to Make Food From Weeds(Opens in a new browser tab)
- Tomatoes Hate Cucumbers: Secrets of Companion Planting + Popular Planting Combinations(Opens in a new browser tab)
- The Trick (and Treat): How to Grow Giant Pumpkins(Opens in a new browser tab)
