Waiting for the man...

As rambling as this post threatens to be - Morning Glory grown from a packet of cheap seeds. One of those packets that I keep at the back of my seed drawer until the time is right and this year the time was right and the seeds germinated and grew. I’ve tried to grow Morning Glory before but without success, so I’m pleased to have about a dozen or so plants twisting and winding their way up the sunflowers and trellis in my yard.

They are related to the bindweeds. As children - out in the fields in a time when children were allowed to roam miles from home despite the perverts and muderers – we’d pick the large white flowers, grasp the greenery at the stem, pinch, and out would fly the flower – tumbling to the ground like a fairy parachute.

“Granny pop out of bed!” we’d cry; and that was the name we called them by, ‘’Granny pop out of beds.” I know now that they were a type of convolvulus, ipomoea; the largest genus in flowering plant family Convulvulaceae, with over 500 species.

Back in the seventies selling the seeds was banned for a while as the seeds contained mind altering substances, LSD actually. Apparently all you have to do is grind the seeds in a mortar and pestle, mix with water, and you are away. Really away. Maybe that’s why it’s one of the ingredients in the fabled elixir of life and why the Aztecs fed it to their sacrificial offerings. Even the root is used as a Voodoo charm to ward away impotence, so all-in-all a pretty useful plant.

The flowers only open in the morning, closing tight as the evening falls, so it’s strange that the Greeks call them moonflowers – perhaps they re-open by the light of Luna, I’ll have to check on the next full moon.

I’ll sit outside in my yard in the moonlight sipping my ipomoea tonic, uplifted and watching as the fairies fly by in their ipomoea flower bonnets, waiting for the man.

Yes, “We’ll grow sweet Ipomoea to make us feel much freer then take a pinch of Schemeland and turn it into dreamland.”

See you later Mr. Harley and by the way... it works.