Types of Vines for Landscaping Your Home

If you need to hide something unsightly, vines are great climbers that should hide that mess in a few years.

For covering house walls, boulders, stone walls, etc., ivies are used more than any other vines.

Boston ivy is the quickest growing.

Japanese bittersweet (Euonymus radicans) is a good vine for walls, too; evergreen, it grows well on the north sides of buildings as well as on exposed locations.

Winter-creeper, in both large and small-leaved varieties, is a hardy vine for wall planting.

Other vines can cling without aid to concrete, brick and stone.

These include Chinese trumpetcreeper, English ivy, Lowe ivy and Virginia creeper, sometimes called woodbine or American ivy.

Virginia creeper is the ivy that twines around trees and covers the ground in woodlands, and while it makes a good building cover, it becomes heavy and requires thinning out as it grows older.

Virginia creeper is also effective for providing shade. (Other shade-producing vines are grape, Dutchman's pipe and silver vine.)

Many vines that are not self-supporting can be trellis-trained, adding color and beauty to a house. Among the showier varieties are wisteria, with its clusters of white to purple blossoms; clematis, which has a large flower appearing from early summer until fall; and trumpetcreeper, with its tropical-looking clusters of big scarlet and orange flowers during late summer.

There is also trumpet honeysuckle, which has clusters of red and yellow perfumed flowers; and climbing hydrangea, with its large white clusters. Some of the annual vines, such as the hyacinth bean, which grows on strings and has many flowers, or the scarlet runner bean, which has showy flowers, are good for shade, too.

For covering banks and ground where you have difficulty with grass, you might try periwinkle (also called running myrtle), an evergreen with blue flowers all summer. Another evergreen is pachysandra, and moneywort, which flattens against the ground.

Some attractive and fragrant-blossoming annuals that you might also consider are: nasturtium; bal-foon vine, which is good to cover fences; cypress vine, with a large number of small star-shaped flowers in orange, red and white; and the familiar morning-glory and moonflower plants.

Parts of this article are by Paul Curran, CEO of Cuzcom Internet Publishing Group and webmaster at Trees-and-Bushes.com, which provides a range of quality plants, trees, bushes, shrubs, seeds and outdoor garden products.

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