Gardens have a fourth dimension, and vines are how you plant it. Trained up a wall, over an arbor, or through the branches of a tree, climbing plants turn vertical space into flower, fragrance, and shade where there was only air.
Madeira vine is a fast, twining, deciduous climber with fleshy, heart-shaped leaves and sprays of tiny, fragrant cream-white flowers in late summer and fall. Anredera cordifolia climbs by winding tuberous stems, and a warty crop of aerial tubers along the stems, some as large as a small potato, is the surest mark of the plant and a ready means of increase.
Hardiness
Zones 7–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
10–20 ft.
Spread
6–10 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Vine
Traditional use
topical applications, reproductive health, general wellness
Jasminum officinale var. grandiflorum, the Spanish or Royal jasmine, is the large-flowered, intensely fragrant jasmine of perfume and tradition, a semi-evergreen twining vine that opens clusters of pure white, star-shaped flowers whose scent is among the most prized in the plant world. Larger-flowered and more tender than the common poet's jasmine, this is the plant behind jasmine absolute, the costly essence at the heart of classic perfumery.
Hardiness
Zones 8–10
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
10–15 ft.
Spread
4–6 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Vine
Traditional use
topical applications, mental & emotional well-being, general wellness
Jasminum x stephanense, the Stephan jasmine, is the rare pink-flowered hybrid of the group, a cross between the red jasmine, Jasminum beesianum, and the poet's jasmine, Jasminum officinale. The vigorous, semi-evergreen scrambling vine carries small, soft pink, fragrant flowers over slender stems clothed in fine pinnate leaves, combining the pink of one parent with the hardiness and perfume of the other.
Lonicera sempervirens 'Sulphurea' is coral honeysuckle gone golden, a yellow-flowered form of the native trumpet honeysuckle that trades the usual scarlet for clear, soft sulphur-yellow. The tubular flowers cluster in tiered whorls at the branch tips from late spring through summer, glowing against fresh green leaves so the whole vine looks sunlit even under a gray sky.
A small rose with a long story. 'Magic Dragon' is a 1969 introduction by Ralph S. Moore (1907 to 2009), the legendary Father of Miniature Roses, who bred more than three hundred cultivars from a small nursery in Visalia, California across nearly seven decades. Moore all but invented the climbing miniature category single-handedly, crossing tiny old varieties like Rouletti with full-sized climbers and selecting the offspring that kept the small leaves and flowers but stretched into climbing wood.
Nearly every rose in your garden that blooms more than once a year owes a debt to this one. 'Old Blush' is a China rose, bred in China for something close to a thousand years and known there as the monthly pink, and they are generally reckoned the first East Asian rose to reach Europe, recorded in Sweden by 1752 and offered in England as Parson's Pink China in 1793. They brought with them the one thing Western roses simply did not have: the habit of blooming again and again across the season rather than once and done. Crossed into the old European roses, that single trait rewrote the genus. On the Ile Bourbon they met an autumn damask and produced the Bourbons; in Charleston, just down the road, the rice planter John Champneys crossed them with a musk rose and produced the first Noisette, the only rose class born in the American South. Bourbons, Noisettes, hybrid perpetuals, and in time the hybrid teas all trace back through this unassuming pink shrub. 'Old Blush' could have retired on the legacy and instead just kept flowering. In the South they are very nearly everblooming, throwing clusters of soft semi-double pink that, in the China way, deepen rather than fade in the sun, blush going to rose as each flower ages. The canes are nearly thornless, the constitution famously tough; these are the roses you still find blooming alone at abandoned homesteads, having outlived the house and the gardener both. Grow them for the flowers. Know that you are also growing the root of the whole modern family.
This variegated form of Confederate jasmine, or star jasmine, is grown as much for the foliage as the flowers. Each leathery, evergreen leaf is bordered and splashed with creamy white, often flushed pink in cool weather, and the leaves run larger than on most forms of Trachelospermum jasminoides, so the vine reads as a soft, marbled cloud of green and cream on a fence or trellis even out of bloom.
This is a Trachelospermum, one of the star jasmines, offered here as an unnamed selection. Like others in the genus, the plant is a twining, self-clinging evergreen vine with glossy, leathery, dark-green leaves that clothe a fence, trellis, or arbor in dense green through the year and take readily to clipping into a clean, structured cover.
Ampelaster carolinianus is a woody, scrambling, semi-evergreen vine that climbs through shrubs and over stream banks along the coastal plain of the southeastern United States, opening lavender-blue flowers in November and December when every other aster has long since finished. The climbing aster keeps a private schedule, and that contrary timing is the whole charm.
Crossvine is a high-climbing, semi-evergreen native vine with bright trumpet flowers, and 'Helen Fredel' is a large-flowered selection in red-orange with a yellow throat, a shade between the old varieties 'Atrosanguinea' and 'Tangerine Beauty'. Climbing high by tendrils and adhesive holdfasts, the crossvine flowers heavily in early summer and again, more lightly, later, and shows to best effect on a fence, an arbor, or a trellis in sun or part shade.
Crossvine is a high-climbing, semi-evergreen native vine, and 'Tangerine Beauty' is the famous tangerine-orange selection, opening a spring blaze of bright orange, trumpet-shaped flowers and blooming again, more lightly, through the season. Climbing high by tendrils and adhesive holdfasts, the crossvine shows to best effect on a fence, a wall, or a trellis in sun or part shade, where the early trumpets draw hummingbirds in numbers.
Crossvine is a vigorous, semi-evergreen native climber that ascends by tendrils and adhesive holdfasts, and var. atrosanguinea is the red one: where the typical crossvine flowers orange, this striking selection, introduced by Woodlanders, carries abundant deep red to red-purple trumpets, often over narrower, longer leaves. The flowers even smell faintly of mocha on a warm day.
Callerya reticulata, the evergreen wisteria, is one of the most graceful vines for the Southern garden, and one of the most refined. Once known to botanists as Millettia reticulata and Wisteria reticulata, this evergreen climber is not a true wisteria, though the cascading habit and aristocratic bearing recall one. A vine for porches and pergolas, the evergreen wisteria prizes quiet bloom over brash spectacle, and carries both fragrance and folklore in the tendrils.
Decumaria barbara, the native woodvamp or wild climbing hydrangea, is a self-clinging woody vine of the southeastern United States, grown for glossy foliage and flat, creamy-white flower clusters that echo those of the true hydrangeas in early summer. In the wild the vine belongs to wet bottomland forests and swamp margins, and also climbs in the rich, moist coves of the southern Appalachians, hauling itself up tree trunks on hairy aerial rootlets, the holdfasts that let the plant grip bark, brick, or stone without any support at all.
Gelsemium rankinii is one of the South's gentler mysteries, a twining, semi-evergreen vine that has long threaded through the quiet wetlands and river margins of the Gulf Coast. Where other vines sprawl boldly, the swamp jessamine moves with a kind of restraint, weaving through shrubs and small trees on glossy, fine-textured foliage, with a poise born of deep, humid landscapes.
Carolina jessamine is the twining gold of the Southern spring, native to the southern United States and honored as the state flower of South Carolina. An evergreen vine of easy grace, the plant clothes a fence or trellis in glossy, narrow leaves and, as winter loosens, opens a wash of fragrant yellow trumpets that scent the whole garden.
Carolina jessamine is the state flower of South Carolina and one of the most beloved evergreen vines of the South, prized for the wash of fragrant yellow trumpets that opens the gardening year. 'Margarita' is the cold-hardy answer to that beauty, a selection that carries the same sweet-scented gold well north of where the species usually gives out.
Redwing is grown less for the flowers than for what follows them. Through the warm months this fast, twining, semi-woody climber carries loose clusters of small clear-yellow flowers along the stems, pretty enough in passing, but the real event comes after, when each pollinated bloom ripens into a bright red winged fruit, a samara built exactly like the spinning key of a maple. In quantity the red keys smother the vine and glow against the small, neat foliage, an unexpected and long-lasting display that few visitors can name.
Jasminum beesianum, the red jasmine or Bee's jasmine, breaks the mold of a genus known for white and yellow flowers. This vigorous, semi-evergreen twining climber from the mountains of Yunnan and Sichuan carries small, star-shaped blooms in a deep rose to velvet-red, an unusual color among the jasmines, softly and sweetly fragrant, opening in late spring over slender stems and small, pointed green leaves.
Jasminum officinale, the poet's jasmine, is the classic hardy jasmine of old gardens, a vigorous twining vine hung with intensely fragrant white flowers through summer. 'Fiona Sunrise' is a gold-leaved form of that familiar plant, raised at Fromefield Nursery in England and registered under the cultivar name 'Frojas': the new leaves emerge a bright chartreuse-gold, lighting a trellis or fence, and soften to green as the season goes on, while the sweetly scented white flowers open from late spring into summer.
