Waiting for the Morning Glories

The morning glories are refusing to bloom again. Like most years, they have already grown lush and covered the pergola with their generous heart shaped leaves. And like most years, there is this long delay before the buds and flowers come. I’ve been waiting patiently, but yesterday while driving to my bi-weekly speed shopping in the early morning at Trader Joe’s with the other old folks, I saw two gardens with lushly blooming morning glories. Granted they were the dark purple variety, not my preferred Heavenly Blue, but still I was jealous.

You can’t start morning glories until the weather is settled in the spring. They don’t transplant well so the tough and tiny round seeds get planted directly into the soil, but not until the nights are consistently above 50 degrees. Where I live, this is sometime after the beginning of June—depending on how adventurous you are. If the weather is warm enough and you soak the seeds overnight before you plant them, they spout quickly and grow at an astonishing rate of up to several inches a day—eagerly climbing whatever string or vertical support is handy.

Every year, the morning glories reach the top of the pergola in three or four weeks. Then they continue to grow—twining around other tendrils at the top and sending other shoots to follow the first climbers. Now in mid-August, two and a half months later, the morning glories are a mass of foliage that looks wonderfully healthy and lush. But still not one flower or even a bud.

I’ve read that morning glories don’t flower if the soil is too rich. But I grow them in relatively small planters and don’t enrich the soil or give them supplemental feeding. In fact, the mass of foliage so far exceeds the amount of soil they grow in that in the hot weather I have had to soak the planters twice a day to keep the foliage from wilting.

With the cooler weather, I’m conscious of the limits of the season. Some plants do well until the full frost comes. But the morning glories die after the first night in the mid-forties. This could come as quickly as mid-September, though more likely a month after that. It’s a brief window.

Of course when the morning glories do start blooming, they will produce scores of blossoms daily—impossibly lovely and delicate swirls of powder blue—each one a miracle of craftsmanship and design. Each flower flourishing for one brief morning, then the thin tissue of blue collapses on itself and falls away. Only to be replace the next morning by other blossoms. It’s a lovely and extravagant display that delights me every year.

And every year I have to remember to appreciate my impatience as part of the fun of it all. Like a little child who wants to read the same book over and over even though he knows and because he knows the ending, I wait eager and excited as the pages turn and the days go by. The ten tiny morning glory seeds have directed the show quite well up to this point and I have to trust that again this year they will accomplish their miraculous destiny.