Sweet potatoes are morning glories, or morning glories are sweet potatoes. That's because sweet potatoes are Ipomoea batatas, in the genus Ipomoea with all the morning glories. If you've grown sweet potatoes, you will have seen the tubular blue flower, very like weedy morning glories such as Ipomoea hederacea and Ipomoea purpurea.
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| sweet potatoes, Ipomoea batatas |
This spring I've been gardening daily. My current Garden Concept is a space of native plants, that welcomes the insects that eat them and the birds that consume the insects. But I like plants, so I have no intention of digging out the peonies or lilacs, even though they support very few native insects. With that complex approach, I took a look at my garden and discovered it was even more complicated.
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Dyer's madder, Rubia tinctorum (madder and coffee family, Rubiaceae) was the base of most red cloth in Eurasia for millennia.
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| dyer's madder, Rubia tinctorum |
