Climbers

Climbing plants work with the gardener to help tie the earth to the sky, lifting the landscape high into three dimensions and providing it with a luminous ceiling. Training a climber and letting it scale the heights on its own, can be your most dramatic design gesture. This is as close as you'll come to magic tricks for softening the starkness of a wall, casting shade where there is the glaring sun, screening a view that makes you wince, draping a doorway, dressing up a fence, curtaining an outdoor shower. Many climbers can't perform without a help-they need to be tied to a sturdy post or trellis: some need taut wires, strings, or even another climber to curl their tendrils around. But start a single seed of an annual vine, like morning glory, and there is no stopping its ascent. The hardest part about planting a young perennial climber is the wait. But remember the adage: the first year, it sleeps: second, it creeps: the third year, it leaps! After that, it's your job to keep climbers from clambering into windows and other places where they're unwelcome. Decisive pruning is a hard but necessary lesson for eager gardeners to learn. Then, the sky's the limit.

The Virginia Creeper, Parthenocissus quinquefolia, is a fast-growing deciduous vine with soft green five-leaflet foliage (each leaf resembles a little hand) that turns crimson in the Autumn. The creeper climbs by branching tendrils with adhesive tips, like suction cups: wield clippers to keep them from latching on to wood shingles or clapboard. Tolerates any soil or conditions and grows in the sun or shade in zones 3-9.