Argyreia nervosa, the plant behind the seeds

Hawaiian baby woodrose is the common name of Argyreia nervosa (Burm.f.) Bojer, a woody climbing vine in the Convolvulaceae, the bindweed or morning glory family. It grows wild from the Indian subcontinent to Myanmar and has been introduced to many tropical regions, including Hawaii, parts of Africa and the Caribbean (RIVM, 2020; Wikipedia).

One plant, many names

The vine has collected names in every region where people grow it. The Dutch risk assessment lists, among others:

The synonym Ipomoea speciosa matters for the law: rules written for the genus Ipomoea can, depending on the country, catch this plant too. The legal status page covers that.

What the vine looks like

A mature plant is a perennial woody climber that can reach about 10 metres. The government of Queensland, where the vine has gone wild, describes it as follows (Business Queensland):

• Leaves: large and heart-shaped, up to 30 cm across, dark green on top and covered in silvery white hairs underneath. The silver underside is what gives the plant names such as silver morning glory and Argyreia, from the Greek for silver.
• Flowers: trumpet-shaped, about 5 cm across, pale pink to white with a dark pink or violet throat, in clusters.
• Fruit: round white berries that dry out on the vine. Birds eat the fresh berries and spread the seeds.

The seeds sit inside that dried fruit, usually three to five per fruit. They are brown and weigh roughly 100 mg each. Growers harvest the pods only when they are completely dry (RIVM, 2020).

The fungus that makes the alkaloids

For decades the alkaloids in morning glory seeds were puzzling, because ergot alkaloids are normally made by fungi, such as the ergot fungus on rye. Research since 2011 has shown that the same is true here. Morning glories that contain ergot alkaloids carry a seed-borne fungus of the genus Periglandula, a relative of ergot, which lives on the surface of young leaves and is passed on through the seed (Steiner et al., 2011).

In 2015 a team from Indiana University examined eight species of the family, including Argyreia nervosa. Every plant that had ergot alkaloids in its seeds also carried Periglandula, and closely related fungi produced similar alkaloid mixtures (Beaulieu et al., 2015). This helps explain a practical fact covered on the alkaloids page: the content of a seed depends on the fungus inside the plant it came from, so seeds of the same species can differ a great deal.

Relatives in the morning glory family

Argyreia nervosa shares its family with several other plants whose seeds contain lysergic acid derivatives. The best known are Ipomoea tricolor and I. violacea (the garden morning glories) and Turbina corymbosa, also listed as Rivea corymbosa, the source of the seeds called ololiuqui in Mexico. In ololiuqui seeds the chemist Albert Hofmann identified ergine as a natural product (Wikipedia: Ergine).

The Dutch risk assessment notes that morning glory and ololiuqui seeds also contain LSA, in lower amounts than Argyreia nervosa (RIVM, 2020). This site is about Argyreia only.

A plant that can escape

In warm climates the vine grows quickly and birds spread the berries. In northern Queensland it smothers trees and invades rainforest, and it is now a restricted invasive plant there: it may not be given away, sold or released into the environment. Anyone growing it in the tropics or subtropics should keep it contained and remove seed pods before they fall. The growing page has more on keeping the plant in a pot or conservatory, which is the normal situation in Europe.

Read on

• LSA and the other alkaloids in the seeds
• Growing the vine as an ornamental
• Legal status by country