Sidewalk Greenspace on New York's Upper West Side
My favorite variety of morning glories continues to be the Bavarian “Grandpa Ott” with its deep purple blooms.
They do a great job of climbing the fence — or bamboo rods, or tall plants, or anything else they can find for support — and although their flowers don’t stay open for long, there are so many of them that they provide a constant stream of color for months throughout the late summer and into the fall.
Someone left a sprouted sweet potato lying on the dirt in one of the garden planters this spring, so I dug it in just to the level of the surface and it’s been very happy, with four vines coming off of it, each six feet long and happily tangled in the fence trellis.
I’ll need to do some research to know how to over-winter it — do I just leave it in place and assume it will die back and resprout in the spring?
There’s not a huge amount of floral color left this late in the season, but we still have a decent wall of green along the hundred feet of sidewalk frontage.
