JACQUEMONTIA/
"LITTLE WHITE BELL"

At the risk of over morning-glorying you, I just have to tell you about yet another morning-glory species, for in many places along roads and in abandoned cornfields it's creating very pretty, viny, snowy-flowered mantles for bushes and trees. That's it below:

Since the vine is basically a tropical species I don't think it has a proper English name; in general people just call it by its genus name, Jacquemontia. In Spanish it's called "Campanita Blanca," or "Little White Bell," because of its small, white, bell-shaped flowers. Five species of Jacquemontia are listed for the adjacent state and I'm guessing that ours is JACQUEMONTIA NODIFLORA.

The morning-glories we've looked at so far have belonged to the genus Ipomoea, which is the main morning-glory genus. A distinguishing feature of Ipomoeas is that their stigmas -- the pollen-receiving zone of the female pistil -- are ± spherical, or "globose." You can see some Jacquemontia stigmas below:

In that picture the five, ± spherical items at the ends of long, slender, inward-curving stems, or filaments, are the stamens' pollen-producing anthers. The lowermost item in the photo, which looks like a white, horizontal bar connected at its middle to a stem arising in the flower's center, is composed of two elongate, slender stigmas. So, Jacquemontia's stigmas are long and slender, not spherical, like's Ipomoea's.

When I first go out in the morning and it's still chilly, Jacquemontia's many flowers are mostly closed, but after sunlight has bathed them an hour or so they begin opening, and by mid morning usually they are as wide open as they can be, and nearly always by then they are just swarming with very busy honeybees.