Morning Glory
The morning glory flowers are funnel-shaped flowers, which open at morning time, allowing them to be pollinated by hummingbirds, butterflies, bees and other daytime insects and birds. When dusk falls they are pollinated by the hawkmoth. The flower typically lasts for a single morning and dies in the afternoon.
New flowers will bloom each day. The flowers usually start to fade a couple of hours before the petals start showing visible curling. They prefer full sun throughout the day, and mesic soils. In cultivation, most are treated as perennial plants in tropical areas, and as annual plants in colder climates, but some species tolerate winter cold.
Morning glory is also called asagao. A rare brownish-coloured variant known as Danjuro is one of the more popular ones. It was first known in China for its medicinal uses, due to the laxative properties of its seeds. It was introduced to the Japanese in the 9th century, and they were first to cultivate it as an ornament. During the Edo Period, it became a very popular ornamental flower. Aztec priests in Mexico were also known to use the plant’s hallucinogenic properties to commune with their gods.
Ancient Mesoamerican civilizations used it to coagulate rubber latex to produce bouncing rubber balls. The sulphur in the Morning Glory vine was used to vulcanize the rubber; a process which pre-dates the Charles Goodyear discovery by over 1000 years. Because of their fast growth, twining habit, attractive flowers, and tolerance for poor, dry soils, some morning glories are excellent vines for creating summer shade on building walls when trellised, thus keeping the building cooler and reducing air conditioning costs.