Morning Glories

This was the view out our raised deck sliders all summer. Oh, I miss it so. When you can have color like this for practically nothing, why wouldn't you have a few planters out every window? We do!

This spring, I planted eight seeds in a little plastic eight-pack. Four were moonflowers, and four were Morning Glories, "Heavenly Blue" variety. They all came up, but the moonflowers never were able to shed their seed coats; the cotyledons rotted inside. The same thing happened to three of the morning glories. It was too darn wet for them, raining and raining, and morning glories and moonflowers hate wet feet. But the fourth morning glory survived, and when it got its first true leaf I planted that little plant down below our deck and watered it now and then.

It writhed around on the ground for awhile, throwing out tendrils, and then took a hint in the form of a trellis and began twining up, up, up.

The kids really didn't notice it until it started peeking up over the deck railing. At about that time it started blooming from the bottom up.

And Phoebe and Liam would go out every morning and count the blossoms. One, five, eight, 17, too many to count. They'd run back in with today's count. I miss that, too, now that they're getting up in the dark to go to school. We would go out into the back yard by Liam's willow just to gaze on it, this tower of flowers.
All from a single seed.

Plants give us so much, if we let them into our world.