Trumpet Creeper

What’s blooming in the area: Tea and miniature roses, Apache plume, rose of Sharon, winterfat, daylily, lilies, onion, datura, bindweed, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, purple phlox, bouncing Bess almost gone, bigleaf globemallow, white sweet clover, alfalfa, velvetweed, yellow evening primrose, scarlet beeblossom, alfilerillo, willow gaura, goats head, toothed spurge, portulaca, pigweed, silver-leaf nightshade, buffalo gourd, zinnia, wild lettuce, horseweed, goats beard, Hopi tea, chicory, spiny and hairy golden aster, farmers and garden sunflowers, corn, sideoats grama, redtop; tomatoes visible from road; second cut beginning for smooth brome hay.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartweig, yellow flax, squash, chocolate flower, fern-leaf yarrow, blanket flower, coreopsis, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat, perky Sue, chrysanthemum.

Looking east: Large-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, pinks, coral bells, ipomopsis, California poppy, garlic chives, hollyhock, winecup, pink speedwell, pink evening primrose, Jupiter’s beard, sweet alyssum from seed; buds on sedum and cutleaf coneflower

Looking south: Rugosa rose, tamarix, Illinois bundle flower, sweet pea, Sensation cosmos.

Looking west: Caryopteris, buddleia, Russian and Rumanian sage, catmint, ladybells, perennial four o’clock, flax, purple ice plant, white spurge, sea lavender, purple coneflower, Monch aster; buds on David phlox and leadplant.

Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, moss rose, Dahlberg daisy, French marigold, gazania; first tomato formed.

Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium

Animal sightings: Gecko, hummingbird, large brown moths, bees moved to caryopteris, ants, grasshoppers.

Weather: High afternoon temperatures with few clouds have dried any evidence of last week’s rain; 14:52 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Recently one of my boss’s tenants complained about her bathroom. When our foreman went to look, he reported a tree had grown into the wall and knocked tile off the shower wall.

It was the first time I seriously considered the ways adobe walls differ from wood or brick, and realized there was another good reason this area developed an aesthetic that prefers bare ground around a house. It also made me hope Rosalie Doolittle wasn’t being literal when she suggested trumpet creeper was "effective against native homes" in Albuquerque.

Campsis radicans is native to the oak-hickory-pine forests that grow in the Mississippi flats north from Texas to Ohio, east along the Gulf coast, and over the Atlantic plain to southern Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The roots spread through moist soil to send suckers some forty feet up tree trunks, where they clamor from branch to branch and drop seeds from taupe pods in late fall.

The orange, two to three-inch long flowers are handsome funnels filled with nectar that attract hummingbirds and ants. The waxy outer side is often brighter than the matte interior, and shades from a yellowish base held by a deep coral calyx cup. Nested against glossy dark green branchlets of five or six pairs of leaves, they evoked tropical glamour to the men who took them back to Europe in 1640.

When I first lived with trumpet creeper in Oakland County, Michigan, the woody vine ran loose in my neighbor’s yard and crept into my garden. After he built a privacy fence, I tied the runners to hooks and discovered they developed two rows of teeth below the leaf nodes that attached themselves to wood like velcro. When that man sold the house, the new owner found the aërial roots had done so much damage to the mortar, the bricks needed to be repointed.

Currently some ten people have vines blooming around the village, almost everyone at the front property line behind, but not weighing down a wire fence. Two have done little more than let their plants sprawl along the ground like pumpkin vines. The others must have given their stems short poles, because they’ve climbed four or six feet, and now put out horizontal branches each spring that bear terminal flower clusters.

In only one place has the vine discovered a tree to revert to its natural form, and that was a traditional property that had been abandoned before it was converted to commercial use. In addition to the vine in the Siberian elms and on the nearby back fence, there are shorter mounds in front nearer the irrigation ditch.

The lure of beauty accompanied by the loss of folk wisdom can be dangerous. Only three people are growing trumpet creeper between the village and my house. I don’t know if that’s because others can’t get them to grow on our drier land or they don’t like the outsized liana. I suspect the woman with the deciduous perennial near her chain-link fence and the one letting it go on a mesh fence near a ditch have roots in the community and its common store of knowledge, while the family who has it climbing the corner of a double-wide is probably new.

As for the house managed by my boss’s company in Santa Fe, I have no idea if our foreman was right. The man who did the repairs only said there was a leak somewhere in the wall, but he couldn’t do any more than replace the tile. A man from Montana raised to expect normal housing saw nothing, while a man raised in northern New Mexico saw non-existent disasters he’d heard about as a child. Neither noticed the nearest tree was more that six feet away, and that, in a lush neighborhood of old family compounds, the nearest trumpet creeper was a block away.

Notes:
Doolittle, Rosalie. Southwest Gardening, 1967 revision.

McGinley, Mark, editor. "Mississippi Lowland Forests," 2007, in World Wildlife Fund, Encyclopedia of Earth, available on-line.

Photograph: Trumpet creeper with flowers and a pod growing with Virginia creeper on a wire fence and Siberian elm near town, 7/27/08.