Do Morning Glory Annuals Reseed Themselves?

Carpe Diem

• Some flowers are elusive, hothouse beauties, offering elegance and complexity for those experienced gardeners willing to invest the time. Morning glories are the opposite. Even the rankest beginner finds immediate success with these old-fashioned favorites. The eager shoots can emerge just four days after seed meets soil, and rise to spreading, 10-foot vines, joyfully covering trellises, slopes or chain link fences with the dramatic, often fragrant flowers. Sadly, each blossom's life is one day only, but more crowd in to take its place.

Seeding and Reseeding

• The recipe for stunning morning glory vines is not complicated. Prepare the seeds for planting by scraping each with a nail file or offering them an 8-hour, warm water bath. Plant the seeds in a sunny spot in moist, well-draining soil and hold your breath. Before a week rolls round, your morning glories are poking heads into the world. While life offers few guarantees, morning glories generally self-seed easily to reappear the following growing season.

Confining Your Crop

• Gardeners with ample terrain can simply stand back and watch morning glories spread their color across sloping banks, up tree trunks and over fences. But the vines grow so merrily and reseed so easily that they can become aggressive, climbing over other plants to take over a larger area than that allotted. You can limit their exuberance by growing the annuals in pots. Add either sand or perlite to the potting soil for extra drainage, about a quarter to a third of the mix. Don't forget to set up a structure for the potted vines to climb.

So Many Colors, So Little Time

• The traditional morning glory is a dramatic shade of blue, deep and sensual, bordering on purple. But myriad cultivars exist with different colors and features. According to Cornell University experts, you can find morning glory cultivars in all shades of white, pink, violet, red and blue. Then there are the patterned blossoms. Try "Milky Way" for snowy white flowers festooned with purple stripes, or "Morning Star" for a mix of all shades of purple, blue and red tones, all with white throats and contrasting star.