Ornamental Sweet Potato Vine Flower

While the ornamental sweet potato plants don t often flower when blackie does it produces lavender or purple trumpet like flowers.

Ornamental sweet potato vine flower.

Ornamental sweet potato vine ipomoea batatas is valued for its colorful foliage and rapid easy care growth habits. Although the plant works well as a ground cover it is especially effective. The foliage lends a tropical feel to the garden and comes in a range of colors and varying forms. The ornamental sweet potato plant ipomoea butatas is somewhat different from its southern grown vegetable sibling.

That means the tubers it forms are actually edible. Often grown in container gardens for its trailing stems of purple chartreuse or variegated foliage ornamental sweet potato vine is actually related to the sweet potatoes you d grow in your vegetable garden. Popular varieties like marguerite have small round tubers while varieties like blackie have longer narrower tubers. This heat loving perennial will die back if the plant experiences hard freezes below 32 degrees fahrenheit 0 c.

While it does produce edible sweet potato tubers albeit not very palatable and bitter the ornamental variety bears more colorful foliage making it a popular houseplant.