I just completed a fall chore—tidying the potted plants that decorate the deck at the back of our house. The petunias and geraniums had ceased blooming, so they went onto the compost pile, dirt and all, and their pots went into the garage till next spring.

The morning glories, a giant tangle of delicate vines, faded flowers, and dying leaves, went to the compost as well, but little did the morning glories know that they had narrowly escaped a much earlier banishment.

This past spring I thought it would be fun to grow something on my deck from seeds, instead of relying solely on plants already pre-grown for me by the green thumbs who stock the garden center. I pictured a climbing something, like morning glories, and I bought a seed packet featuring a picture of dramatic trumpet-shaped flowers in a beautiful shade of blue.

I planted the seeds in two large terra cotta pots, one at either end of my deck, and I created structures for my morning glories to climb on using three metal stakes, like long skewers, in each pot, tied together at the top in a teepee shape.

Excitingly, my seeds sprouted in less than a week, and it was fun to see the first leaves, two little ovals, appear. They didn’t look at all like “adult” morning glory leaves and reminded me of learning long ago in biology class that all plants (not grasses though) start life looking quite the same.

As the adult leaves began to appear, I watched my sprouts get taller, mentally urging them to find the climbing structures I had created for them. They, however, seemed not to understand what I expected, sending their delicate vines out to flail randomly, oblivious to the metal stakes in their midst.

Finally one vine latched onto a stake, twisting around it most magically, and then a few more did, and soon it became apparent that they wanted to climb much higher than I had prepared for. They quickly reached the tops of my teepees and kept growing, sending long questing vine extensions out in all directions, even eventually doubling back and wrapping themselves around themselves in a complete tangle.

All this while there was no sign of flowers, and it was past the middle of the summer.

The plants in one of the pots were near the end of the deck where, beyond the deck, a huge viburnum grows, thrusting up shoots that by this time were several feet taller than the deck railing. Those plants discovered that their vines could climb on the shoots produced by the viburnum and thus go higher and higher—but still no flowers appeared.

I decided that the flowerless tangles and roving vines weren’t earning their keep in attractiveness, and I resolved to compost them and put something more cooperative in the terra cotta pots. Then I walked out onto the deck one morning for my daily inspection and noticed a flower, my first morning glory!

It hadn’t actually been produced by a vine that had climbed up into the viburnum, but by one that had wandered into a neighboring planter where I had a copious crop of oregano. And the flower wasn’t blue, like the flowers on the seed packet, but rather pink. Seeing a flower was exciting nonetheless, so I gave the morning glories a reprieve.

A few days later, I noticed another flower, a blue one this time, on a vine in the pot at the other end of the deck. More flowers followed, a few, but I never got the profusion that the photo on the seed packet promised. By now it was well into fall, past Halloween in fact, and the leaves on the plants were beginning to turn yellow and some were even brown, so yesterday I pulled up all the vines and said goodbye—until I try again next year . . . perhaps.