Folks, I wanted so badly to do justice to morning glory in the studio. A chaotic, octopus-like mass of this crazy climbing vine had claimed a stretch of ditch a few miles from my house and grabbed my eye every time I drove by it – the brilliant purple flowers just sang with color.
The effect was even more dazzling when I parked on the side of the road and got eye-to-eye with it. Climbing up the tall, sturdy stalks of sunflower like a trellis, the morning glory’s vines stretched up toward the sun, jeweled with dew and humming with bees. It was magical, it was gorgeous … and it was impossible to transport, because the vine had knitted the entire ditch’s vegetation together into one crazy bundle of greenery.
how do you move THIS into the studio?
My plan had been to disentangle the morning glory from its host plants right there in the ditch, starting from the ends of the vines and working my way back to the root, so I could cut it at the last minute and run home before it wilted. It was a good plan but in the words of a famous boxer, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
Well, maybe it wasn’t a punch in the mouth, but reality firmly tapped me in the face that Labor Day morning as I thrashed around in the ditch trying to unwind a Gordian knot of morning glory. After about a half an hour that yielded very little progress, I moved to Plan B: cutting down a huge armful of the greenery – sunflowers, foxtails, morning glories and all – and hauling the whole shebang back to the studio in one piece to disentangle there.
Plan B was more effective but not a complete success. Back home, I did find it easier to unwind the vine from its hosts when both plants weren’t attached to the ground but separating everything was still a time-consuming process and unfortunately the blossoms had lost much of their starchiness by the time they were ready for photographing. Trying to squeeze through of a rapidly-closing window of opportunity, I fired off some frames that captured some of the color and the chaos of this morning glory, but didn’t do justice to the joyful exuberance of its ditch-overtaking ways. This is one plant I’d like to revisit next year and try again.
Morning Glory
Shoot date: September 2, 2019
Possible use as a cut flower: I wish! But the blooms get wilty within a half hour of cutting.
