Ochracea and Suzy Q

One's blooming and one isn't.
It's warm here today so I toted it out of the g house, hoping a bee will
come along. I have a few more to open yet. Since this is a species, can I
self it?

Jackie

NICE!! It gives me hope that I might get one to bloom someday. Patootie, what zone are you in?

Sorry the pic is out of focus. It was very difficult to get a good shot.
I took about 5 and the color just fades out.

patootie, really special. thanks for posting and the focus is fine here (or maybe I always see things a little fuzzy).

Wont hurt any thing to try

Thanx Beth and Jude. Beth, I'm in zone 7, central Arkansas. This one stays
in the g house in the winter. All my plants come out by May as the temp will near 130
It's in a 10 gallon pot. I had to repot in Sept as it was drying out twice a day. This
spring I will cut it back as looks like it's only blooming on new growth

Jackie

I have heard that Ochracea will only bloom in S. Cal and Florida so I was discouraged. If I can bring mine in the greenhouse for the winter, maybe I can get it to bloom too. I have just purchased seeds so I don't have experience with it yet.

I am in Florida and although Ochracea has taken over one area of chain link fence this year it has yet to bloom.
Jan...

Beth, I started my seed last yr about April. It came along just wasn't blooming by the time I placed it in the g house, late Oct. By Dec, it needed repotting but I noticed
buds. I gently lifted it up and placed a couple inches new potting mix in the bottom of the pot. Had to as it was drying out so bad, I could have lost it.
Seed pods formed, then dropped since I didn't have a pollenator.
If I can get seeds, I want to share so
this one can be grown and enjoyed by many. If everyone I share them with feels the same, it will no longer be such a rarity.

Jackie

great thinking Jackie. The rare ones need to be passed around over and over to prevent them from going away forever.

I wonder why the seed pods dropped, it didn't self pollinate? Does it have male and female flowers? That seems unlikely, since most of the other MG's self pollinate. I notice that most of the first blooms that a plant gets drop and do not form seed pods. I always thought it was because the plant was still shifting from the vegetative growth mode to blooming and seed setting. Does anyone know if this variety is different?
Beth

i just got seeds for that one

Beth, I had at least 20 flowers on it last winter in the g house. Not 1 seed pod
matured. Stayed on for 6 or 7 days at the most. When I asked if I could self it,
it was because I thought each flower had male and female parts. I had not
bothered learning how to do this since I wasn't looking to cross or hybridize anything.
I hope a bee did the job for me today. If not, I'll be looking for a tutorial.

Jackie

Hi Yall,

I planted some ochracea seeds this past spring in south Louisiana, and still have not gotten a single bloom. The vine is looking a bit ragged, but still alive. If anyone out there has any tips about growing this MG, please post them.

Thanks!
Mark

The Ipomoea ochracea is a perennial...perennial MG's are often more self-incompatible than annual species...the plant can sense what is going on in the seedpods and if there is too much selfing going on the buds may start to form but eventually fail to fully develop and drop off...

The majority of the seeds of Ipomoea ochracea available to MG gardeners in the US are from the ReUnion Islands in the Indian Ocean from the Barbadine outlet

Here is an entry in the PlantFiles by the owner of Barbadine

JJacques
http://davesgarden.com/pf/showimage/61914/

Here is the entry by Cat who lioves in the Southernmost arera of Texas

Cat
http://davesgarden.com/pf/showimage/93135/

Self-incompatibility and/or successful pollenation are some of the reasons that these plants may not besetting mature fruit,but the overall climate and type of sunlight available at the latitudes that this strain is from is also a significant factor...

Learning how to hand pollinate the flowers is useful to intentionally insure adequate pollenation of any plant to assist in maximun seed set and is not just for intentional 'crosses' or 'hybrids'...I mentioned this in a some previous threads on the topic...

Ipomoea ochracea that originates from the West Indies may prove to be better adapted to the blooming and setting seed in the continental US..

Just a few thoughts to consider...

Glad to see this thread....

TTY,...

Ron

Would growing several plants and cross pollinated them help? What if those plants came from seeds of the same source? There are not many sources of these seeds available!
Beth

Beth, I will look for my pkt soon. I think it's going to say Chiltern's in England
But, Iwould have sworn that my first order of Ochracea came from Mr Hudson,
seedsman in Calif. I combine seeds sometimes if I have more than 1 pkt and
there's some left in both. I have 3 or 4 seeds left as back-up.
Would be great if 1 or more of those came from a different source.
Edited cause I forgot to say thanx to Ron. Too early for me, I'm a
night owl.

Jackie


This message was edited Nov 8, 2006 10:54 AM

If I remember right, all my seeds came from Cat Traylor in Edinburgh Texas. Looking into her threads, she says hers came from Reunion Island.

This message was edited Nov 8, 2006 10:21 AM

Mark, Did you plant yours in the ground or a pot? If it's in a pot, take it in for
winter and give it bright light, some sun if possible.. Otherwise, mulch it well
and see if it comes back in the spring. From what I'm hearing, we would have to be in
zone 10 or higher like Cat in southernmost Tx to get it to bloom outdoors.
I know it's the shorter day length or cooler nights that trigger the buds for me which must be why I only get winter blooms (in a g house)
Cat's temps might not fall off that much at night so she gets blooms and seeds and the flowering continues right on thru the summer. That's not going to happen here in
zone 7.

Jackie

I'm going to grow mine in containers this spring. Then I'll bring them in my small greenhouse in the fall and keep them under HPS lights.
Beth

Beth, when I find my pkt and see how many seeds I have left, lets talk again.
Maybe we need to swap a couple of our seeds and see if we can get a
different source of pollen. Wish now that I hadn't wasted some of my seeds.
I start or have been known to start hundreds of seeds in the spring, that's simply too many for an old lady to care for so I lose some. Plus I gave some ochracea's
away to people that just ended up killing them. Not a good move on my part
with the scarcity of seeds. We live and learn.

Jackie

Jackie,
That sounds good, maybe our seed came from different sources. I am hoping!
Beth

baolvera - Yes,even different seeds from the same plant can have different genetics >so more plants would usually equate to a wider gene pool in the available pollen...

If there are seeds from geographic areas and/or strains other than the ReUnion Islands available to add into the gene pool >that would increase the overall genetic variability...

TTY,...

Ron

Howdy All,

Saw this thread and decided to add to it. My original seed stock came from JJ back in 2002 or so. I've been growing these vines since then. Had several that froze in December 2004 but I cut them back to about six inches from the ground and they grew back in force :o) They bloom profusely and put out plenty of seed. They also tend to grow really really long tendrils...I've often had to cut them back because they grow over everything in sight. They start blooming in the Fall out here and continue on until about April and May. I get lots of seedlings that sprout from fallen seeds so I guess it has something to do with our weather and the warm ground??? Whatever it is, it works :o)

I trade ipomoea ochracea seeds I've collected from my vines...am always on the lookout for bulk quantities of common seeds that are good nectar or larval hosts for butterflies.

~ Cat

I have been getting 1 or 2 blooms every day for the most part.
I think I see a seed pod but don't want to say much. Afraid to even breathe really.
I tried to take a picture of it but it didn't turn out. It's not a bud and it's roly poly
and good size. Now if it just doesn't fall off. Could have been one of the days I carried it
out of the g house and a bee found it. I hope I will be doing the happy dance soon.

Mine is just now starting to bloom. Go figure in December, even for Florida.

Jan, when does yours usually bloom? Was it hotter there than normal early fall?
I'm thinking ochracea was just waiting for the nights to cool down some.
Cat posted above that her's stops blooming in April, so it doesn't like the heat
apparantly.

Jackie

Mine were planted early this spring but being a periennial here it may take longer to bloom.
The other one blooming has been in a pot for the second year now but only produced a few blooms the first year.

Could it be possible that the reason I. ochracea blooms during our fall and winter be that it originated south of the equator? just wondering

To Ron and others more knowledgeable and experienced than I, what about the potential as a repository of knowledge of Wikipedia? They've got a page on Ipomoea and need an expert's input on I. ochracea. I'll bet there are some other blanks in there, too.

Blue, Maybe you're onto something. Australia is south of the Equator and when it's summer there, it's winter here.
I had to look for Reunion Island and I see it's about the same distance from the Equator as Australia. Very interesting.

Jackie

Jackie, I just put "Ipomoea ochracea" + Australia into www.google.com search hopper, and according to the following link, it's native to Africa but naturalized (implication to me means was introduced) in Australia.

Also, according to the next link, I. ochracea can make quite a nuisance of itself when happy: http://www.hear.org/pier/species/ipomoea_ochracea.htm , as in Hawaii.

It is interesting how activity and/or growing patterns of a life form can betray something about the environment of its origin.

Blue, I just read that in Africa, for the most part, they have warm sunny days and cool nights. Their summer is Nov to March. That's what we see here, blooming from Nov to March or so. Blooms triggered by the cooler nights or because that's when it would bloom in Africa.
It's difficult to picture it as a nuisance with seeds so hard to come by. If we had known,
we would have been asking our members in Hawaii to get us seeds. LOL

Jackie

Here is a great link that puts origins of I. ochracea and its Ipomoea kith and kin in geographical perspective:
http://protist.i.hosei.ac.jp/Asagao/Yoneda_DB/E/Ipomoea/05.html

Dr. Yoneda's last sentence in the foregoing link is very intriguing:

"Whether the place of origin of the morning glory is in America or Asia, it is necessary to study the mechanisms for the morning glory's dispersion over the wide seas 3). "

There is a fascinating theory about aboriginal human routes of travel in the Pacific between America and Asia where East might have met up with West. The theory was constructed by Thor Heyerdahl and is discussed in the following link. (Y'all, don't click on where it says "Back to the Main Index", because the main index has some political content that will be noxious to some and contrary to Dave's acceptable use policy.) The link on Thor Heyerdahl's theory is at: http://www.greatdreams.com/thor.htm

I also seem to recall reading some time ago in the Smithsonian magazine that approximately 700 years before Columbus landed in what was to become known as America, the Chinese had a nautical technology far superior to anything the Europeans had in Columbus' time, and they were trading up and down the African coast on their side of the Pacific. I mention this because Dr. Yoneda notes a resemblance between an African and Brazilian MG strain and then wonders "What relationship does the Asian group have to the New World group?"


And, then, Ron has talked about how natural patterns of hurricanes and other patterns of air and current could have dispersed MG species surprising distances, too.

I apologize if I've hijacked your thread, but the contextual web of an entity, to me, is as fascinating as the entity in and of itself.

Karen, Very interesting but getting way over my head. I believe the m glory being
a hard shelled seed could have indeed floated great distances by sea to wash upon
shore. Mr Hudsons catalog is full of the legend and lore surrounding some of these seeds
ie the sea bean, Mucuna. I did not realize that China had been traveling up and down
the coast for centuries before Columbus supposedly discovered America.
I never even considered that the m glory's might have been a trade item.
I think we can't discount either theory, by sea or trade or even the birds.

Jackie

Mr. Hudson's catalog is absolutely one of my favorite catalogs to muse over by our woodstove in winter. Some time, I'll write more on MG dispersal before modern times - there's a craft to shaping a question in order to elicit good answers, and I can't take the time right now. Your thread on this African MG begs so many questions - like the effect of latitude upon flowering that Ron brought up. There is so much to wonder about just that.

Welp, I look forward to hearing more about how your I. ochracea does this winter for you - you can't post too many pictures, either.

Many thanks,
karen

Karen, thank you for the insight. I think it will come back to the distance from the equator too. Just as Ron said. If my seed pod matures, I can consider myself lucky.
Seed production needs to be tested all across the country. We will see a pattern.

Jackie

Seed pod on ochracea, bottom left.
There may be others, I haven't looked

OOOOH!! Photograph these when they bloom!
Beth

Beth, I couldn't get a good photo. I see finally what I'm doing wrong.
If I hadn't been so concerned with getting the purple eye in each pic,
I might have realized I was too close. See the 2nd bloom farthest from the cam.
Still a problem though when the g house is so sunny.

The flower looks a little over-exposed, but I can still see it is lovely! Let me play with my photo editor and see what I can do with it.