Morning Glory

The morning glory, Ipomoea and related genera, is a twining vine bearing wide trumpet flowers that open with the dawn and wither by the afternoon of the same day. That brief glory is the root of its symbolism everywhere it grows: the flower stands for the fleeting nature of life, love and beauty, for a single day's brilliance, and for the mortality that its brevity makes plain. In Japan the morning glory, asagao, became a beloved subject of Edo-period horticulture and poetry, its short-lived bloom a favourite emblem of the transient and of a love that cannot last.

Morning glories have also been an important subject of modern plant science: their reliable daily opening and closing made them classic model organisms for studying photoperiodism and the plant circadian clock, the internal biological rhythm that lets a plant anticipate dawn rather than simply react to light, research that has shaped a good deal of what is understood today about how plants tell time. Several Ipomoea species are also vigorous enough to be classed as serious agricultural weeds in parts of the world, notably in cotton and soybean fields in the southern United States, a plain modern agronomic fact sitting oddly beside the flower's delicate reputation in Japanese poetry.

Certain morning glories carry a further, weightier history: the seeds of some American species contain ergot-related alkaloids and were used by the Aztecs and other Mesoamerican peoples as ololiuqui, a sacred divinatory and visionary preparation taken under priestly control, its use recorded by early Spanish chroniclers who condemned it. This belongs to a specific ritual tradition and is described here from the outside; the seeds are genuinely toxic, and this is history and not any encouragement to use them. The morning glory thus carries two meanings drawn from two real properties, the gentle emblem of the day's brief beauty from its dawn-to-noon flower, and the grave sacred-visionary role of certain species from the chemistry of their seeds.

The active compounds identified in these seeds, chiefly ergine and related ergot alkaloids, were studied and chemically characterised in the 1960s by the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, already known for his earlier discovery of LSD, whose research confirmed that the Aztec ololiuqui tradition rested on a real and potent, though chemically distinct, class of psychoactive compounds rather than on suggestion alone, a case where twentieth-century pharmacology took a colonial-era missionary condemnation and found, examined coolly, a genuine chemistry behind it.