Saturday, March 7, 2009

Creepers


This is a Virginia creeper or Parthenocissus quinquefolia a beautiful creeper which puts on a great display in Autumn.It is a wonderful creeper for shade in summer and light in winter which turns crimson with the coooler weather. Training it over a deck or balcony and allowing it to fall from wire or trellis will create a very pretty look in an outdoor room area. Or just letting it climb up a wall or fall over a rocky retaining wall will have a lovley effect. It can be allowed to grow up the outside of your house if your in a cooler area giving a very European effect.

Another alternative is Ornamental grape vine or Vitis vinifera as seen below which turns a beautiful crimson as the days grow cooler. Very pretty. Then over winter we have

a banksia rose which flowers in about August and puts on a very pretty display of but can be a bit weedy so be warned.

Here in dry dry Melbourne some native plants are being adapted as creepers or prostrate growers as we have seen with the Royal Mantle and Correas, but being an avid gardner I am always searching for new ones.

A beautiful creeper, evergreen and with very showy flowers is Pandorea jasminoides, which comes in two colours, pink with a dark magenta centre and white with a slightly yellow centre. They are really very tough. In fact I have one in my chook pen and they havent killed it yet!








Kennedia nigrikans is another wonderful creeper which is little seen, but has really interesting black and yellow flowers. I have one of those too but it seems to be struggling i believe because it gets disturbed by birds which scratch around it. This is a member of the pea family and as such is a nitrogen fixing plant. A good thing here in Australia where our soil is nitrogen deprived.

A favorite of mine would have to be Hardenbergia violaceae which just cannot be ignored. The bees love it the birds love it and it too is a nitrogen fixing member of the pea family . It is available in traditional purple and white, and now there cultivars in pink, and purple and white and who knows what comes next! But it is a tough little vine and very pretty when flowering.

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