Okinawa is absolutely covered in Morning Glory. Lamp posts, houses, hillsides are bedecked with the plant. It climbs tens of meters up trees and the drive to work in the morning is a joy as all the flowers are out and pointillist splats of blue are everywhere.
Post outside my house.
An entire hillside of Morning Glory. Poor mid afternoon photo I am afraid
Anyway, during the day I was cogitating on this blog when my learned friend Hideo Yamasaki, by amazing coincidence during a great visit to theUniversity of the Ryukyus this afternoon, gave me wonderful information on the Morning Glory. This was unprompted – he just started to talk about Morning Glory. Isn’t life strange.
So, the Morning Glory was the object of intense research and development during the Edo period in Japan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edo_period
Hundreds of new varieties were bred. The Rose to England, the Tulip to Holland , the Morning Glory to Japan.
Classical paintings of Morning Glory c. 1817
Many thanks to Yamasaki san for these beautiful paintings
Here is a web page about Morning Glory.
http://mg.biology.kyushu-u.ac.jp/
It is Japanese but if you click around you will find everything you ever wanted to know about these beautiful flowers.
Try the links below:
The Quiet Ripple Defines The Pond 
While in Vietnam recently I was puzzled to see “morning glory” in the English translation of the menu in some restaurants. I understand that it’s also known as water spinach. I think I ate some.
Just moments before reading your blog I was looking at this picture:
In Chinese it’s called ong choy, or so I read.
Thanks for the comment Joel
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