Outdoors
Morning glory
Ipomoea tricolor 'Heavenly Blue'
Sky-blue funnels with a white throat and a small yellow eye, on a twining annual that reaches the top of the fence in one season. Each flower lasts a single morning.
- In flower now
- Climber
- Average
- Type
- Climber
- Light
- Full sun
- Water
- Average
- Hardiness
- H1C
- Where
- Back garden, twining up the fence
- Flowers
- July–October
- Colour
- blue, white, yellow
Flowering year
Flowers July–October. It is currently August, so this plant is in flower.
Individual flowers open at dawn and are over by mid-afternoon; the display looks continuous only because it makes so many.
Outlined month is August, today.
Care
- Watering
- Water when the soil dries out rather than on a schedule. It carries a lot of thin leaf on a shallow root system, so it flags visibly in heat and picks straight back up once watered — a wilt at four in the afternoon is not necessarily a problem.
- Feeding
- Nothing, ideally. On rich soil or a general feed it makes an enormous quantity of leaf and almost no flowers — if it is all foliage, the answer is to stop feeding it, not to feed it more.
- Pruning
- Pinch the growing tip out once at about 30cm to make it branch, then leave it. No deadheading needed — spent flowers roll themselves shut and drop.
Winter — Nothing to do
Frost ends it and there is nothing to save. Pull the stems off their supports while they are still soft, because once they have dried onto netting they are very hard to unpick, and sow again in April.
Pets and children
The seeds contain lysergic alkaloids and are genuinely poisonous if eaten in quantity — worth knowing if seed packets get left about. The rest of the plant is not a concern.
Sky-blue funnels about the width of a palm, each with a white star in the throat and a small yellow eye, held out from heart-shaped leaves on a stem that twines around anything thin enough to grip. The blue is the point — a clear, slightly cold sky blue that very little else in the garden does at this time of year.
What it actually wants
Poor soil and full sun. Fed well, it puts everything into leaf and produces almost nothing, and the natural response to a plant that looks lush but will not flower is to feed it again, which makes it worse. Keep it hungry.
The seed has a hard coat. Nick it with a knife or soak it overnight before sowing, or germination is slow and uneven. Sow into deep pots or root trainers rather than a shallow tray — it resents root disturbance enough that a checked seedling will sit and do nothing for a fortnight while an undisturbed one is already at the top of its cane.
It climbs by winding the entire stem, so it needs something narrow to wrap around. Canes, wires and netting are fine; a flat fence panel or a fence post is not, and it will hunt sideways for something better rather than go up.
Winter
Nothing survives. The first real frost turns the whole thing to wet string overnight and the job is simply to clear it away before it welds itself to the supports. Collect seed if you like, but in a cool summer this one often fails to ripen any before the frost arrives, so expect to buy fresh in spring.