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 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.
Bold, burnished orange trumpets in generous early-summer clusters make Lonicera × tellmanniana one of the most striking climbing honeysuckles ever raised. The hybrid crosses the American coral honeysuckle, Lonicera sempervirens, with the large-flowered Chinese Lonicera tragophylla, and takes the best of each: vivid color, strong growth, and clean foliage, without the invasive streak of the weedy honeysuckles.
The double white Lady Banks rose is a true heirloom of Southern gardens, the kind of rose a grandmother trusted and passed along over the fence. Unlike most roses, this one asks for little and gives a great deal. Nearly thornless, the long green canes climb with ease, spilling over fences, arbors, and old farm gates as they have for generations.
Of all the plants that carry Sir Joseph Banks's name, and there are a great many, this rose carries his wife's. Banks was the most powerful botanist of his age: president of the Royal Society, the man who effectively built Kew, who had sailed with Cook to the far side of the world. When a thornless climbing rose came west out of the Chinese gardens, it was named not for him but for Dorothea, Lady Banks. The white double arrived first, collected at Canton in 1807. This one, the yellow, followed in 1824, carried back by the plant hunter John Damper Parks by way of the Calcutta botanic garden, an old Chinese garden form that had been grown and selected for generations before any Englishman set eyes on it.
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 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.
Few vines work as hard for as little as the coral vine. Antigonon leptopus comes out of Mexico with heart-shaped leaves, tendrils that grab any small object within reach, and long sprays of small papery flowers in a hot, slightly unreasonable pink from midsummer until frost stops the show. The flowers are borne in such quantity that the whole plant seems to fizz, and the common names have piled up accordingly: coral vine, queen's wreath, Mexican creeper, chain of love, and, in the Gulf South, confederate vine. Bees find the plant before you do.
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.
A yellow-flowered, floriferous selection of a vine that normally comes orange. 'Judy' climbs high and fast on aerial rootlets, carrying compound deciduous leaves of glossy toothed leaflets, and from midsummer onward produces terminal clusters of trumpets in a clear soft yellow with a darker throat. The flowers are three inches long and shaped precisely for a hummingbird's bill, which is not a coincidence and not lost on the birds; a trumpet creeper in full flower is the busiest thing in a southern garden in July. Bloom continues in waves until frost.
Campsis x tagliabuana 'Madame Galen' is the trumpet vine at its most garden-worthy, a vigorous deciduous climber hung all summer with clusters of big, flaring, orange to salmon-red trumpets. The vine is a hybrid between the American trumpet creeper, Campsis radicans, and the Chinese Campsis grandiflora, combining the toughness of one parent with the refinement of the other. Raised in the nineteenth century by the Tagliabue brothers at their nursery near Milan, 'Madame Galen' has remained the favorite form of the cross ever since.
Clematis armandii is the evergreen clematis, a bold, glossy-leaved vine that breaks nearly every rule of the genus. Where most clematis drop their leaves and climb daintily, this one holds large, leathery, dark green trifoliate leaves the year round and grows with real vigor, then smothers itself in fragrant white flowers at the very start of spring. Few vines open so much bloom so early, and fewer still carry evergreen foliage handsome enough to grow for the leaves alone.
Clematis crispa, the swamp leather flower, is a small and delicate native vine that trades the flat, showy face of a garden clematis for something quieter and stranger. The flowers hang solitary and nodding, little urns of thick, leathery blue-purple, paler within, their four recurved sepals frilled and crimped at the tips like curled ribbon. Slightly fragrant and endlessly charming, this is a clematis scaled for a small garden rather than a barn wall.
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.
This luminous evergreen groundcover came into gardens through Heronswood Nursery, from a collection the plantsman Dan Hinkley made on the slopes above the Wolong Panda Preserve in western China. The long, dark green, sharply pointed leaves are laced with bold silver-white veins, a ghostly netting that gives the cultivar the second half of the name and lifts a shaded corner out of the gloom.
Ficus nipponica is a handsome evergreen climbing fig from Japan and temperate East Asia, a self-clinging vine that dresses walls, masonry, and tree trunks in glossy green the year round. Where the familiar creeping fig, Ficus pumila, carries small rounded leaves, this rarer relative bears larger, more pointed foliage and a somewhat tougher constitution. Botanists now file the plant under the sprawling Ficus sarmentosa complex, as Ficus sarmentosa var. nipponica, though it remains best known to gardeners by the older name.
