The keepers of the Greenway mowed and poisoned a wide swath of each edge of the path downing much of the wild flowers growing there, but the Morning Glories have managed to return. However, what I thought were just Morning Glories were actually two different kinds of plants. Both plants are in the Convolvulaceae family, and each are commonly called “Morning Glories”, but the scientific name for one is either Calystegia sepium, or Convolvulus sepium, (take your pick) and its common name is Hedge Bindweed. The scientific name for the other plant is Ipomoea pandurate. Its common name is Man-of-Earth Morning Glory. Both plants have similar looking, trumpet shaped flowers, but the Man-of-Earth Morning Glory has heart shaped leaves, while the Hedge Bindweed Morning Glory’s leaves are arrow shaped.
The Hedge Bindweed and its close cousin, the Field Bindweed, reproduce from both seeds and rhizomes. Seeds of the Field Bindweed plant can persist in the soil for up to 50 years, and rhizomes can be as buried as much as 30 feet in the ground making it almost impossible to eradicate in farmers’ fields. Hedge Bindweed has a shallower root system and is not as troublesome. More commonly found in uncultivated areas, it can still be seen as an unwanted pest. The leaves of this plant are larger and more triangular in shape than those of the Field Bindweed plant. Both plants trail along the ground, or climb on vegetation. They are perennial, and bloom from May to September. These plants grow all over North America except in the far north, and they can tolerate any amount of light, from sun to shade. The flower bud unwinds in the day, then re-twist at night, to wilt away or to open again with the light. Buds also twist when they are finished blooming. While they both have striking flowers, these plants are difficult to eradicate, and can become serious weeds. Field Bindweed contains Alkaloids that are mildly toxic to some livestock, and might cause problems with digestion. Field Bindweed flowers are not as large as those of Hedge Bindweed which are 2 to 3 inches across. Usually the trumpet-shaped flowers are white, but they might have a red “throat” or center, and the plant twines in a counter clockwise direction. Young stalks, young shoots and roots are edible when boiled. But the plant can be a purgative, so remember to not eat too much, and don’t eat the plant too often. The name, Calystegia, comes from the Greek, kalyx (calyx) and stegon (cover) referring to the brats (or special leaves) that hide the plant’s calyx. The calyx of a flowers is the name for all of the green parts (sepals) that surround a flower bud.
All across the earth, there are 60 genera, and at least 1,650 species of the Morning Glory or Convolvulaceae, family. Usually they are herbaceous vines, but some species are trees, like Ipomoea arborescens, better known as the Tree Morning Glory found in Mexico, or shrubs, like Ipomoea donaldsonii, found in Ethiopia or Tanzania, which also has thorns. But the Morning Glories found on the Greenway are either one of the Bindweed variety or Man-of-the-Earth Morning Glories.
The genus of Man-of-the-earth Morning Glories, Ipomoea, contains more famous relatives like the Moonflower, the Water Spinach, and the Sweet Potato. It is the largest genus in the Convolvulaceae family, and it also includes plants that are herbs, shrubs and trees. Most plants in this genus are found in tropical or subtropical regions all over the world because they can grow in a variety of climates from tropical rain forests to semi-deserts or even in areas along the coasts. Several species are common all over the earth, but a full 2/3 of the recognized species of the genus are indigenous to the Americas and grow as far north as Canada. Only 1/3 of the species of this genus are native to the Old World including another garden favorite, Ipomoea indica, or the Ocean Blue Morning Glory, which has escaped from gardens and is now considered invasive in most continents including Europe and Asia. Some species, like the popular Ipomoea violacea, or the Heavenly Blue Morning Glory, are native to tropical America and also escaped from gardens and are now considered invasive in some states like California. New species of the genus are found every year.
The scientific name for the genus, Ipomoea, is a combination of two Greek words; Ips or Ipos meaning worm or woodworm, and Homoios meaning something that resembles the twining stems of the plants. While the word “worm” refers to the little animal that burrows into the ground, it also refers to the spiral part of a corkscrew that latches onto the cork of a wine bottle and lifts it when you pull. Two species of Ipomoea plants have global importance. One is Ipomoea batatas, the sweet potato, and the other, Ipomoea aquatica, water spinach, otherwise known as Kang-kong. Kang-kong is a green vegetable that is cultivated in Asia and Africa and used extensively in Asian cuisine. The Sweet Potato is one of the most widely consumed crops in the world, and a staple in the diet of many cultures. The sweet potato plant is native to the Americas, but no one is quite sure where it originated. Archeological finds indicate that the plant has been cultivated for at least 5,000 plus years and possibly 5,000 years more in Peru. It is one of the first crops brought back to Europe when Columbus returned there in 1492, and by 1493 the plant was already being cultivated in Spain. Sweet potatoes are supposedly very easy to grow. My sources say that you can just throw the peels with eyes into the ground and a plant will spring up. Or you can put some of the potato that has eyes into a jar of water, and green leaves will grow. Not only are the roots edible, but so are the leaves which can be cooked like a green.
Interestingly, sweet potatoes are not Yams. True yams belong to the Discorea genus which originated in Africa and Asia. In the 1930 Louisiana farmers decided to call a type of American Sweet Potatoes with a soft texture, “yams”, to differentiate them from the regular Sweet Potatoes grown in the state. The name stuck partly because Americans descended from Africa had always called sweet potatoes yams because they looked so much like the ones they had grown on that continent. In other countries another plant, Oxalis tuverosa, is also called a “yam”. This native of the Andes is called Oca in Spanish, but Yam in New Zealand. It was introduced to Europe in the 1830s and to New Zealand in 1860s to compete with Solanum tuberosum or the white potato, another American native. Man-of-the-Earth Morning Glories were not introduced to Europe as a food crop and are not recognized as being as nutritious as they are although some references note that the tubers were eaten by the Native people of North America. Another Ipomoea species, macrorhiza, with the common name of Pink Moonvine, grows in coastal areas of southwestern U.S., but is very rare. This plant was probably brought to this region of the continent by inhabitants of Yucatan long before Columbus arrived. Its large roots are edible and can be eaten raw. The plant has crinkled foliage and large white to pale pink flowers which bloom at night.
Man-of-the-Earth Morning Glories are native to Florida and most of the eastern half of North America. The showy flowers are a little larger than those of the Bindweed plants, and they have large heart-shaped leaves. A vine that can grow up to 30 feet long, these Morning Glories grow well in average soil, and need full sun to partial shade. The plant prefers moist conditions, but once established, it can tolerate dry soil. The stems of the plants are usually hairless, and often reddish or purple in color. Its heart-shaped leaves are alternate and measure up to 6” long and 4” across. Sometimes, the smaller leaves are oval in shape. Each flowering stalk has a cluster of 1 to 5 funnel-shaped flowers. The corolla of each flower is white, with a center throat that is rosy pink or reddish-purple in color. The stamens of the flowers are white and project slightly from the throat of the corolla. The light green sepals are blunt and overlap. The flowers bloom in the morning, (or in the afternoon on cloudy days), and close later in the day. The flowers bloom from spring to fall, with a typical plant blooming for about two months. Each fertilized flower will create a 2 celled capsule containing 2 to 4 seeds. The seeds are flat and conspicuously hairy along their outer edge.
Man-of-the-Earth Morning Glory large flowers attract hummingbirds, long-tongued bees, honey bees, bumble bees and digger bees. Insects seeking nectar also collect pollen from the flowers as well. The flowers are less commonly visited by swallow-tail butterflies, skippers and sphinx moths. The foliage is bitter and a little toxic, so it is avoided by most mammals and herbivores, but its long leafy stems provides dense tangles that prove to be good hiding places for birds and other kinds of wildlife in summer and early fall. The common name, Man-of-the- Earth, refers to the large tuberous root, but it is also known as Wild Potato, Big Root Morning Glory, the Indian Potato, Wild Sweet Potato, Wild Sweetpotato Vine, Manroot, or just plain, Morning Glory.
The most amazing thing about the Man-of-the-Earth Morning Glory is that its root system produces large edible tubers that can weigh up to 30 pounds! Dewayne Allday, a noted forager, writes that the large tubers are completely edible if prepare correctly. However, a problem might arise when trying to find them in the earth. Numerous vines emerge from the same root, but once you find it, and if you dig down with a sharp shovel around 12 to 24 inches, you’ll discover the tubers. As is usual with many plants, the younger and smaller the tuber root, the better it will taste, so leave the largest ones alone, and dig up the smaller tubers surrounding it. Most of the plant’s energy is stored in the roots during the fall and winter, so if you’re interested in trying to eat it, it will be best to locate and mark the plant in the summer and then dig up the tubers in the wintertime. Mr. Allday recommends boiling the tubers in a few changes of water to get rid of the bitterness, and then cook then like you would Sweet Potatoes. If you’ve dug up a very old root, you might need to boil it more than 30 minutes to get the bitterness out of it.
Native Americans dried the tubers and stored them for later use by cutting them into strips and then laying them in the sun to dehydrate until they resembled wood chips. Once put into a bowl of water they will rehydrate with excellent results. The roots will turn soft again, and their taste after cooking will be just as if they were freshly dug. Native American also used the root to make a tea that was used as a diuretic, laxative, and an expectorant for coughs. A powered tea made from the leaves was used to help relieve head aches and indigestion.
Through my research on native wildflowers of this region I am always perplexed about why the European settlers did not eat plants that native people ate. Why did they rely on plants and animals from Europe instead of eating what grew and thrived in the New World? The answer to this question is a sad one, and anyone interest in this topic please check out the top few references below. To summarize my sources: North Carolina was the land of the Roanoke colony, the attempted first permanent settlement of British people in 1585 and then again in 1587. These attempts ended in failure. Without sufficient supplies and abandoned by their benefactors, the 112 to 121 colonists either assimilated with or were murdered by nearby Native American communities. Native people had thrived in the area for thousands of years, living primarily in permanently settled, agricultural and sometimes urban communities, sometimes cyclically moving with seasonal changes, but contact with the European colonists quickly decimated their population.
Nathaniel Batts, a farmer from Virginia, purchased land in North Carolina in 1655 and established the first permanent settlement there founded by Europeans. By then, a large percentage of Native people had died from European and African diseases like small pox, typhus and measles. But disease didn’t kill all of the indigenous people, more were actively killed by the European colonists in wars, planned genocide, enslavement, removal and relocation. The toll was so great, that the estimated 5 to 7 million people who had lived on what is now the continental United States before contact with Europeans was reduced to 600,000 by 1800 and 237,000 by 1900! Along with this, colonists intentionally destroyed flora and fauna used by native people in a further attempt to get them to surrender their land.
Eurocentrism is defined as a tendency to interpret the world in terms of European, and now Anglo-American, values and experiences. It is a belief that European culture was, and perhaps still is, the pinnacle of progress, superior in its achievements, technologies, politics and high quality of life. This ideology enabled Europeans to colonize the Caribbean, Asian and African countries, while exploiting their people and stealing their resources, all the while believing that they were civilizing inferior beings. It is probable that eating food that the “native” people ate was abhorrent, or revolting, to the colonists, as revolting as they found the native people to be. Perhaps the European colonists feared that eating this food or even using the plants as medicines, would somehow turn them into the Godless savages they though the natives to be.
Surely some patrician American colonists felt this way. Others, who might have been more open to eating different foods and using native plants for medicine, just didn’t have anyone to show them how to prepare the bounty that surrounded them. So many native people had died, had been killed, or had been forced to move, that it is possible that the few remaining may have kept their knowledge secret, or even forgotten how to prepare the plants themselves. Unfortunately, we now consider these native plants to be “weeds”, invasive of the more important crops like wheat, barley, rye, rice, and sugar. Even more egregiously we consider them to be pests to be eradicated or controlled. In their stead, we have come to rely on white processed flours, genetically modified corn and corn syrup, along with red meat – foods that have turned out to also be dangerous to our health – food that are probably as toxic to humans as poorly prepared Man-of-the-Earth Morning Glory roots.
Interested in Morning Glories, or Native People of America? Check out the references below, and remember that wild flowers are not weeds! Often they are important to wild life, and could be important food and medicine to humans as well.
Science, “How Europeans brought sickness to the New World” https://www.science.org/content/article/how-europeans-brought-sickness-new-world
David Michael Smith, University of Houston-Downtown, HAS-2017 Proceedings, “Counting the Dead: Estimating the Loss of Life in the Indigenous Holocaust, 1492 – Present”, https://www.se.edu/native-american/wp-content/uploads/sites/49/2019/09/A-NAS-2017-Proceedings-Smith.pdf
J. Sundberg, ScienceDirect, “Eurocentrism”, 2009, https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/eurocentrism#:~:text=Eurocentrism%20has%20been%20variously%20defined,model%20of%20progress%20and%20development
2BN The Wild, Wildflowers of the Southeastern U.S. “Man Of The Earth (Ipomoea pandurata)” http://2bnthewild.com/plants/H67.htm
Lady Bird johnson Plant Database, Calystegia sepium, https://www.wildflower.org/plants/result.php?id_plant=case13
Wikipedia, “Convolvulaceae” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolvulaceae
Cornell University, Cornell Weed Identification, “Bindweeds: field and hedge bindweed” https://blogs.cornell.edu/weedid/859-2/#:~:text=Hedge%20bindweed%20is%20very%20similar,has%20spread%20throughout%20the%20US.
Eat the Weeds, Hedge Bindweed, https://www.eattheweeds.com/tag/hedge-bindweed/#:~:text=The%20bindweed%20stalks%2C%20young%20shoots,of%20said%20is%20not%20recommended.
Universtiy of Oxford, Oxford Plants 400, Plant 399 “Ipomoea species (Convolvulaceae) Morning glories, https://herbaria.plants.ox.ac.uk/bol/plants400/Profiles/IJ/Ipomoea#:~:text=Ipomoea%20species%20(Convolvulaceae)&text=The%20sweet%20potato%2C%20the%20water,genus%20in%20the%20family%20Convolvulaceae.
Deane, Eat the Weeds, “Ipomoea: Water, Land & See in Gardens, “Glorifying Morning Glories”, https://www.eattheweeds.com/tag/ipomoea-pandurata/#:~:text=Ipomoea%20pandurata%20(eep%2Doh%2D,least%20two%20changes%20of%20water
North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox, NC State Extenstion, “Ipomoea pandurata” https://plants.ces.ncsu.edu/plants/ipomoea-pandurata/ , https://plants.ces.ncsu.edu/plants/ipomoea/
Illinois Wild Flowers, “Wild Sweet Potato”, https://www.illinoiswildflowers.info/savanna/plants/ws_potato.htm
Dewayne Allday, Eco Farming Daily, “Havesting, preparing wild potato”, 2015, Acres USA https://www.ecofarmingdaily.com/grow-crops/grow-fruits-vegetables/fruit-and-vegetable-crops/harvesting-preparing-wild-potato/
Alyse Whiteny, Bon appétit, “Yam vs. Sweet Potato: What’s the Difference?”, 2022, https://www.bonappetit.com/story/difference-between-sweet-potato-and-yam