Bits of random verbage from the digital stacks: Glory

Friday evening and I am harvesting morning glory seeds from a hardy local native with smallish, deep purple blossoms. I’ve been collecting seeds for about three years, successive generations of seeds supplemented with similar varieties culled from neighborhood vines on early fall walks. This is the first year since I haven’t gotten around to starting a dozen or so indoors before the frost is past, but it proved irrelevant - though I harvested last year’s thoroughly more than enough seed dropped that volunteers made up the usual burgeoning trellis - ambitious vines piling at the top of the twine lines I ran for them to climb and spilling over to overhang the sidewalk.

I love everything about the morning glory: the way it climbs, gripping its supports in neat coils of vine. The big spade shaped foliage that thrives on abuse. Of couse its name is apt: the bell-shaped blossoms are a glorious way to greet the morning, though it’s sad that they fade so swiftly. But what I like best about the morning glory is the way it seeds. Paper thin spherical ballons that opens in three precise sections where two seeds sleep, jet black crescents smaller than an apple seed. When the flower’s vine has withered and the sepal leaves at the base of the flower dry and curl back to expose the seed pod the seeds are mature and ready to harvest.

I collect them by hand, shucking seeds and hulls into a bowl and occasionally clearing out the chaff by expedient of lightly tossing the contents of the bowl and blowing very hard. The lightweight hulls scatter in my breath but the dense, sturdy seeds are too heavy to be diverted by such a weakly wind.

It’s the first ripe pods of the season, The third day of fall, and I take an inordinate pleasure in the cache of seeds my labor gains me, perhaps half a cup of bitter, inedible grain. I run my fingers through them like a greedy miser might sift gold, feeling the slightest silk of moisture, the new seeds still drying since being broken out of their perfect little hothouse incubators.

Part of my pleasure is that seeds continue to amaze me: in their natural beauty, endless variety, and exquisite designs for securing a safe berth for their progeny, descendents of the ambassadors of sexual evolution on earth. Everything the morning glory does, from the light harvesting foliage to the delicate, pretty flowers that wither in a single day and then ripen for weeks, so that the earliest flowers of the summer are only now bearing, is in service of the seed. It produces generously, setting seed at almost every flower (the blossoms are superb attractors of pollinators): as it blooms daily through the summer it’s production is prodigious.

But this year I’m also particularly enjoying this particular harvest because I’m planning to do a little genetic experimentation myself, disseminating all of my excess seeds through an batallion of volunteers And this is the thing I like most about seeds: they lend themselves to being shared.

this is what is up with this.