Vine Arbor

Even though they can play a useful role in the garden and fill an important niche, as landscape plants vines are underutilized design components of height and verticality and are often neglected by landscape architects and homeowners alike. People tend to focus on herbaceous plants—which they think of as “flowers”—and woody plants— that they limit to trees and shrubs. Vines, whether herbaceous or woody, somehow get lost.

Vines are characterized by fast growth and limited lateral growth (although there are notable exceptions). They can be deciduous or evergreen, monoecious or dioecious, ten feet or a hundred.

Vines are plants that do not support themselves but scramble or climb upon others. They are an evolutionary adaption that developed independently in numerous plant families.

For what purpose?

Why dedicate energy to growing upright with a sturdy and rigid stem/trunk when you can take advantage of other plants to do that work for you? The great lianas of the rain forest (think the long ropey vines in Tarzan) reach the sunlit canopy by piggy-backing on giant forest trees.

How do vines accomplish this? How do they climb?

They have developed a number of different strategies, sometimes using more than one of these strategies at the same time, and sometimes modifying a prefered strategy depending on the available support structure.

These various strategies have fascinated people in many fields of study for a long time. The mechanics of twining and tendrils especially are complex and have been the focus of experimentation and entire books dating back to Darwin. His "On the Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants" was originally published in the Journal of the Linnean Society of London, 1865, 9: 1-118 and later published seperately as a monograph. More recently, in-depth scientific explorations like The Biology of Vines (ed. Putz and Mooney, Cambridge University Press, 1991) have appeared.

Scientists study just how twining vines twine, in which direction they spiral, what the angle of their spiraling is, and how large a center structure they can spiral around, among other things. They study how tendrils reach out searching for something to grab onto, moving around in mid-air until they come upon something of the right diameter to meet their needs for attachment. Time lapse videos of both of these mobile strategies are fascinating to watch and provide scientists with detailed information on these complicated processes.