Ipomoea alba at our Mayan Ethnobotanical Research garden, Guatemala CIty, 1500 meters altitude.
Photo taken with a Nikon D5, natural light, no flash, Gitzo tripod, early evening (circa 6:15pm).
The flower at the right opened first; the flower at the right opened about six minutes later.
On www.FLAAR.org home page we show a third flower that opened 3 minutes later about one meter away.
Ipomoea alba is one of several "morning glory vines" whose juice allowed the Olmec, Maya, Aztec and all their neighbors to vulcanize rubber (thousands of years before Thomas Goodyear thought he had "invented" vulcanization).
We also have the other vine (different Genus and species) in our garden and hope to get the others growing soon. This other vine grows within two meters of Castilla elastica trees (native Mesoamerican rubber tree) out in the wild. Ipomoea alba grows about 20 km away (in same eco-system).
We photographed the opening sequence so we can make a video (out of the 350 individual photos we took over a 12 minute period).
Will take a while to turn all the photos into the video, so check back later this summer.
Aug. 1, 2018
