Mexican flame vine is a daisy that climbs. Look closely at a flower head and the family is plain: a ring of orange rays around a golden center, each head about an inch across, held in clusters at the tips of the stems, deepening from tangerine to red-orange as they age. From about June until frost the vine carries two or three shades at once, like coals at different stages of burning, and the bees and butterflies find the flowers within days.

The trade knows the plant as Senecio confusus, and that is the name we list under, because that is the name gardeners search. Botanists moved the species out of Senecio in 1950, and the accepted name today is Pseudogynoxys chenopodioides, a false Gynoxys with leaves like a goosefoot. Senecio itself comes from the Latin senex, old man, for the white tufts on the seed. The vine is native from Mexico through Central America into tropical South America: a fast, twining evergreen with coarsely toothed, somewhat fleshy, arrowhead-shaped leaves, climbing 6 to 12 feet in a season.

Give the vine full sun, average well-drained soil and something to twine through: a chain-link fence, a wire trellis, a shrub that will not mind a summer guest. Pair the orange with the purples of Mexican bush sage and the red of Turk's cap for a late-season border that hums. One honest caution about the cold: the vine is evergreen only in zones 10 and 11, returns from the base in zone 9, and is a gamble in zone 8, where a deep winter mulch over the crown and a rooted cutting on the windowsill are the sensible insurance. The vine is not salt-tolerant, and in frost-free places the runners want watching.

Read the full overwintering routine in How to Grow and Overwinter Mexican Flame Vine, find more climbers among our Vines, and companions for a hot border in Turk's Cap and Salvias.