Bush Morning Glory

What’s blooming in the area: Tea roses, Apache plume, butterfly bush, trumpet creeper, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, rose of Sharon, leather leaved globemallow, bird of paradise, alfalfa, white sweet clover, Russian sage, milkweed, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, white and yellow evening primroses, datura, bush morning glory, creeping and climbing bindweed, buffalo gourd, goats’ head, purple phlox, alfilerillo, cultivated and native sunflower, bachelor button, Hopi tea, goatsbeard, hawkweed, horseweed, wild lettuce, hairy golden aster, Queen Anne’s lace, muhly ring, blue and side oats grama grasses; buds on tahokia daisy.

What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Red hot poker, hartweg, zucchini, nasturtium, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum, Parker’s Gold yarrow.

Looking east: California and Shirley poppies, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, coral bells, bouncing Bess, snapdragons, Jupiter’s beard, coral beardtongue, Maltese cross, rock rose, pink evening primrose, large-leaved soapwort; buds on cut-leaf coneflower and Maximilian sunflower.

Looking south: Tamarix, Blaze and rugosa roses, daylily, bundle flower, sweet pea, zinnia, cosmos.

Looking west: Flax, catmint, lady bells, sea lavender, white spurge, perennial four o’clock, purple ice plant, blue veronica, purple coneflower.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum, tomato.

Inside: South African aptenia.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, hummingbirds, gecko, dragonfly, hummingbird moth, ladybug, bees, grasshoppers, large black harvester and small dark ants.

Weather: Monday was the hottest day so far this summer; it was still 80 at ten in the evening with no wind and still 70 when I got up the next morning; last rain 7/05/09; 15:32 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: As a child I absorbed Aesop’s fable about the ant and the grasshopper that contrasted the busyness of the one preparing food for the winter with the frivolousness of the other.

When I later heard about the rigid social structure of ants, where sterile females toil for the benefit of the queen, I wondered why the individualistic grasshopper was so disdained. Later still I discovered Aesop is believed to have been a slave in the century before Athens outlawed slavery and began groping towards democracy. Then, society depended on servitude to eat, and men only wished they could let their indolent masters starve.

Now that I have problems with both insects, I wonder if Aesop, or anyone who’s retold his tale, ever had a garden. Certainly grasshoppers are destructive: they will eat everything above ground, so only plants that reproduce early in the season survive for the next year. However, the ant steals seeds so nothing germinates this year.

Unlike me, the bush morning glory blooming in the road cut near the prairie arroyo clearly prefers the ant. The petunia-sized purple flowers stand erect on reddish stems that arch out from mounds resembling young desert willows. A grasshopper can eat a flower, stigma and all, in an hour.

In defense, Ipomoea leptophylla developed glands at the base of its sepals which begin releasing nectar for ants even before the buds mature. Kathleen Keeler says the insects provide protection by nipping the feet of any grasshoppers that land within their range. They’re so successful that plants Keeler watched near the social insects in Nebraska averaged 211 seeds each, while those without ants only produced 45.

It’s easy for man-of-the-earth to prefer ants. Unlike its cousins, the Heavenly Blues and Crimson Ramblers, it’s perennial in this environment and doesn’t depend on producing a crop of hairy, brown seeds each year to survive. Indeed, it may produce no flowers for the first five years of its life, and survives drought by aborting its buds.

The Great Plains native relies on its deep taproot to withstand dry spells, when there may be no water in the top five to seven feet of soil. While some can get to be a foot across, four feet long and weigh 40 pounds, many are half as wide and half as heavy. Some put out lateral branches that can grow 10 to 15 feet, and produce separate crowns. The two plants near the arroyo are close enough to be joined below ground.

The large roots apparently aren’t threatened by insects, but would be dug by humans except, as Edward Sturtevant said, they’re by "no means palatable or nutritious." His 1919 comments were passed from one author to another until Harold Harrington tested them and found only the older roots were bitter. He suggested two-year-old plants could be quite edible.

The problem with following Harrington’s advice is finding young plants. Keeler observed two bush morning glory populations over a decade, and found about 2.6% of the plants died each year. Those that didn’t survive were usually small, and probably younger, the ones Harrington would recommend. She guessed a generation was probably twenty years, and that many bush morning glories lived much longer. Most in any colony are past adolescence.

More important to understanding Sturtevant is discovering the context that was lost in the repetitions. His source was describing the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Kiowa in the late 1860's, after grasshoppers had devastated Colorado in 1864 and again between 1867 and 1868.

During the first plague, Dakota women in Minnesota had boiled half-digested grains they’d scavenged from horse manure and the army had attacked a Cheyenne village on Sand Creek, destroying much of the tribal social structure. When the government issued the report Sturtevant read, natives on the Great Plains were eating anything; looking only for young plants would have been as much a luxury as being a grasshopper in the days of Aesop.

Notes:Harrington, Harold David. Edible Native Plants of the Rocky Mountains, 1967.

Keeler, Kathleen H. "The Extrafloral Nectaries of Ipomoea leptophylla (Convolvulaceae)," American Journal of Botany 67:216-222:1980.

_____. "Survivorship and Recruitment in a Long-Lived Prairie Perennial, Ipomoea leptophylla (Convolvulaceae)," American Midland Naturalist 126:44-60:1991.

Roberts, Jeanne. "Minnesota Sesquicentennial Highlights Native American Plight," 20 May 2008, The Panelist website.

United States, Department of Agriculture. Report 407, 1870, cited by Edward Lewis Sturtevant in Sturtevant’s Edible Plants of the World, edited by U. P. Hedrick, 1919, reprinted by Dover Publications, 1972.

Waldbauer, Gilbert. What Good Are Bugs?, 2003, discusses work of Keeler, including comments not in her articles.

Photograph: Bush morning glory in road cut near prairie arroyo, 18 July, 2009; dark spot just above and to the left of the green cup is an ant.