I'm excited this morning.

I have an Ipomoea aquatica 'Kang Kong' plant with a flower opening up, this is a highland white stem form, growing in a paladularium. Meanwhile in the basement under a light next to cacti are some Ipomoea fistulosa and one of them has two glorious blooms wide open this morning and loaded with pollen!

Fistulosa has a faint amazing odor, indescribable and lacks the vine like habit more common with Ipomoea. Aquatica has hollow stems and like the name suggests is associated with water, though the white stem form does grow somewhat upright when planted in the earth.

In fact there are shared derived traits that exist in both the Aquatica and the Fistulosa populations and they are more closely related than they are to many other plants in the same genus.

Ipomoea are reluctant in many cases to hybridize, often having very low success rates for extremely high numbers of pollination attempts. For this reason today techniques like hormone treatments to prevent fruit abscission and cut-style pollination, as well as embryo rescue, are often used to increase the odds of success.

I use colored bits of yarn tied or string with knots like notations and a notebook with a key to record the crosses, in most cases. Sometimes when there are many flowers I just cross pollinate with a paintbrush. Some Ipomoea which are not typically self fertile do set seed this way, but I have yet to sow it and cannot claim that it is actually a cross (yet?).

It is very common for these crosses to take, start to grow a fruit and then abort, and when it is dissected an embryo with differentiated tissue is clearly visible. I have even seen this happen with pollinating some Ipomoea species with some Convolvulus species, but I am not able to culture the embryos as explants to rescue them. This is the most common type of failure in my efforts, not a lack of crossing or a lack of embryo formation, rather the mother plant aborts the fruit. This is why hormone treatments to prevent this and embryo rescue are used to facilitate interspecific hybridization in Ipomoea.

The size and stage that the fruit is aborted by the plants in such cases often varies depending upon the species and sometimes the fruit drops right before it matures, which can be frustrating!

This is year 3 of the project and the failures are numerous, however as that in some cases crosses succeed on the order of one out of every hundred thousand attempts or more, I often repeat the same cross attempts over and over.

Today is the first time I have had a chance to cross pollinate Ipomoea fistulosa and Ipomoea aquatica and even if it fails, which is likely, this will be a learning experience.
Good Morning!

So I missed a blossom on another adjacent Ipomoea aquatica and I actually have two open this morning!

I emasculated the first carefully after opening it an observing the stamens had not contacted the stigma and then pollinated it with the pollen of Ipomoea fistulosa.
I did not emasculate the second blossom, I just pushed the pollen covered paintbrush right into the flower to touch the stigma, the part that the pollen contacts and germinates on, before it grows a pollen tube, which issue gametes to achieve (double) fertilization of the eggs in the carpels of the ovary at the base of the flower.

Each carpel in a fruit can contain one seed and has two eggs. Ipomoea species don't have many carpels but these species open this morning typically have 5, so that is theoretically 5 potential chances per blossom to set a single seed.

This morning a single flower of ipomoea aurantiaca opened, with no others around to trade pollen with.
Luckily more blossoms were developing.
This yellow flowered beauty is vigorous.

Josh we would love to see photos

Though I did purchase a camera recently for taking pictures I am not in the habit of doing it, and when I do take them, I consider them rarely nice enough to share.

In particular taking images of small details of plants is challenging for me and it rarely works well enough to be worthy of sharing.
Here is a less than great image of a pair of Fistulosa flowers:


Mostly I just write notes in paper notebooks, despite working with Ipomoea for a few years now I rarely take images and have not posted about it before. I have discussed it privately with a few friends over the years, but only in passing.

I'll take a few more pictures this season as the flowers allow and if I like them I will share some here.

Oh pretty in pink! We love seeing photos of what others grow.
I myself like macro closeups and take way more pics than I probably need to. Not so much into the technical/science part of growing them but enjoy reading what others know and learning.

As promised, a flower of Ipomoea aquatica 'Kang Kong' a white stem highland form of the species, opened today and I grabbed a camera.

It is alone and I just spread it's own pollen around, I believe this species is self fertile, but I assume nothing.

This is interesting.

The second flower to open on my Ipomoea aurantiaca opened today, at about the halfway point in the light cycle, as opposed to towards the evening or in the morning.

This is mid-way between Ipomoea that open in the evening verses those that open in the morning. No photos to show, I rarely take them, rather I mostly take notes.

Entwined said: As promised, a flower of Ipomoea aquatica 'Kang Kong' a white stem highland form of the species, opened today and I grabbed a camera.

It is alone and I just spread it's own pollen around, I believe this species is self fertile, but I assume nothing.

Nice!

The photos don't have to be perfect! We just enjoy seeing them!

Josh, are you growing plants inside, or is your climate able to grow year-round?

Growing indoors, I am using short days to induce flowering.
I discuss that a bit here:
The thread "Ipomoea and short day flowering verses automatic flowering." in Ipomoea forum

I do grow a number of Ipomoea outdoors in spring, summer and fall, but I grow some year round indoors to get them to flower at the same time.

The pollinated fruit of Ipomoea aurantiaca has aborted in every case.
It does not appear to self pollinate and when I dissected the ovary of the cross pollinated specimens there was no visible embryo.

In many cases the crosses fail after an embryo forms, this is not one of them, at least so far.

Entwined said: So I missed a blossom on another adjacent Ipomoea aquatica and I actually have two open this morning!

I emasculated the first carefully after opening it an observing the stamens had not contacted the stigma and then pollinated it with the pollen of Ipomoea fistulosa.
I did not emasculate the second blossom,

I have read that there is molecular work indicating that Ipomoea aquatica is closer to Ipomoea fistulosa than to others. Additionally I have observed several synapomorphies between the two, or shared traits that they both obtained from a common ancestor.

I find this all quite interesting.
Both the seed I only pollinated as well as the seed I emasculated before pollinating have fruit forming.

It appears that Ipomoea aquatica x Ipomoea fistulosa results in successful pollination and fertilization, though more observations will be needed to confirm this.

I also have signs of success with Ipomoea setosa fruit that are outcrossed, but the fruits are deformed, despite not aborting, a good sign actually in some ways but it may result in a seed that won't grow or germinate normally. I also cannot claim that the Ipomoea setosa line I am working with is true, as that the seed came from another cross attempt and had a much larger flower than the original Ipomoea setosa parent did, though again more testing and observation are needed to conclude that hybridization successfully occurred.

I need to obtain more species of Ipomoea to continue and expand this series of experiments but I like how manageable Ipomoea fistulosa is indoors under lights. It is easy to keep this plant flowering regularly while still under a foot tall!

I am in a climate and location where very few Ipomoea species can survive from year to year but because in some cases these plants can be invasive and hybrids of them may also be problematic if introduced into certain environments, it is important to proceed carefully with this type of thing.

Evidently what I obtained as Ipomoea aurantiaca is misidentified and should be labeled Camonea umbellata.

With what was sold as Ipomoea being Camonea it just makes me wonder what the real Ipomoea aurantiaca looks like.
For example in the paper Diversification of Ergot Alkaloids and Heritable Fungal Symbionts in Morning Glories, the study looked at Ipomoea aurantiaca and found ergobalansine. However no images of the herbarium specimens and the collected specimens studied in this paper were presented.

The question remains, what does genuine Ipomoea aurantiaca look like?

If you wanted to part with the Camonea umbellata I have an extra container of Ipomoea ternifolia ssp. ternifolia I can offer in a trade.