Climbing Plants

Honeysuckle, climbing roses, clematis - traditional beauties of sleepy village gardens - and a welcome and lively brightener of dull houses; many beautiful plants can be grown against a wall with proper support.

Walls and fences are a blessing as the shelter they provide will allow you to grow some quite tender little shrubs which would just wither and die in an open garden.

Climbing plants do not form a firm stem and are not able to support themselves, they scramble madly along the ground until they find something to climb, usually another plant or a wall.

Climbers are adventurous plants, they make the most of what they can find and are great for covering walls and fences, they can also be grown through other plants for added interest; you can even grow them in containers.

Climbers use various different methods of attaching themselves to their hosts, some with slim hair-like tendrils, some with clinging stem roots, and some with sticky pads. A competent gardener will use climbers for year-round interest, or to obscure the less picturesque aspects of gardening, ie: the compost heap.

Early interest can be provided by hardy winter-flowering Clematis. There are a whole bunch of climbers for spring and summer including a host of annuals, such as the Black-eyed Susan, Sweet Pea and Morning Glory.

Summer colour can always be provided by Nasturtiums, with a terrific blaze of orange, yellow and red; not forgetting the climbing Hydrangea, which will carry its flowers through late summer into autumn; autumn is also the season for fruiting vines such as grapes, and the climbing roses which have flowered all summer will bear their shiny red rosehips.

Most climbers are easy to grow in a wide range of soils providing there is a good mulch of manure and decent drainage.

There are climbers for full sun, partial shade and sunless areas.

Many climbing plants are chosen especially for their perfume. The best loved are the enchanting fragrant climbing roses, jasmine and ever-popular honeysuckle.

To make the most of your climbers, when buying, check the foliage for yellowing leaves. Don’t be tempted to choose one already in flower, choose a nice bushy specimen, and reject plants which are pot bound no matter how guilty you feel seeing them staring pathetically at you from their terracotta prison.

Prepare your ground well, introducing plenty of organic matter into the adjacent ground too. When planting against a wall, make sure you plant at least eighteen inches away from the base of the wall and then angle the plant towards the wall with a cane.

Fill the hole with a mixture of rotted manure or compost and soil. Firm it down and give it a good drenching. It's also a good idea to mulch over the roots to discourage pesky weeds and prevent drying out. You can add a layer of sharp gravel to keep the slugs at bay.

If planting against a host plant, plant outside the spreading canopy of the host and angle in as you would towards a wall.

To support your climber, use a wire strong enough to support it attached to your structure, and when growing over a trellis, tie your plant to the frame.

Until climbers are fully established, they will need a helping hand to grow until they can take care of themselves.

Fixed support will be needed for the non-climbers of the wall-plant world; the best way is to fix wires about a foot apart over the area the plants will cover.

The problem with new houses

Dry soil in borders next to walls can be a problem, and if the house in question is new, nasty, poor-quality sub-soil is likely to be hanging about during building work. It’s better to replace the whole lot down to about a spade’s depth in this case, but if that’s not possible, then at least try to plant shrubs and the like in a patch of good-quality topsoil.

Late spring mulching is also good, but you’ll have to take the usual trouble of drawing back the mulch every so often to see if the soil needs watering.

Pruning wall shrubs

You prune wall shrubs pretty much the same way you prune run-of-the-mill garden shrubs; ie: if flowers appear on the previous season’s wood, you prune right after it stops flowering. If the current season’s wood flowers, you prune in the winter or the early spring.

The aim of the game when pruning wall shrubs is to cover as large an area as possible with flowers, leaves or berries and following a proper pruning method will avoid bare, lonely-looking branches.

Climbing plants for South or West walls

One of the most beautiful of all the climbing plants is the Wisteria, which grows best planted against a west or south facing wall.

Another favourite wall shrub is the ‘Japonica’, known mostly under its old name of Cydonia Japonica. It will give beautiful deep red flowers from March to May in an open garden, but flowers earlier if left to its own devices against a warm wall. A few other popular varieties of the Japonica are the ‘Knap Hill Scarlet’, which flowers a lovely orangey-red; the bright scarlet Simonii, and the soft pink ‘Apple Blossom.’

Ceanothuses are pretty popular, and with good reason; the wonderful evergreen C. dentatus, which reveals some lovely rich blue flowers in the early summer, is always a welcome addition. Of all the deciduous ceanothuses, the ‘Gloire de Versailles’ has a headline slot all to itself, with explosions of light blue flowers brightening up the place throughout summer and autumn.

The Magnolia grandiflora can actually reach twenty feet in height, which is a bit daunting, but it has charming white flowers that lend any garden a picture-postcard prettiness in summer, if you don't mind a floral giant looming over your hedge.

A stunning vine, bearing gorgeous blue fruit in the autumn, is Ampelopsis heterophylla; it’s a strong-growing little climber and a real dazzler, like the Vitis coignetiae, which has large leaves and goes a beautiful orange and crimson colour in the autumn.

Climbing roses for south or west walls include the smooth, creamy white ‘Alberic Barbier’; the dusky pink ‘Dr W. van Fleet’; and the carmine-coloured ‘Zephrine Drouhin’.

For North or East walls

You're slightly restricted for suitable candidates for these walls, but don’t despair, as the ones that will grow well here tend to be pretty first rate. The clematis, for example, both the large-flowered types and the C. Montana and its variety rubens; the winter jasmine (Jasminum nudiflora); the Forsythia suspensa, the spring-flowering kind; and the delicate ‘herring-bone’ cotoneaster (C. horizontalis). The climbing hydrangea (Hydrangea petiolaris) provides a thick screen of white flowers in June, while the vine, Parthenocissus henryana, gives a really stunning display when the leaves go a brilliant rich red in the autumn.

The Morello cherry is a nice decorative fruit for a north wall, but needs limey, well-drained soil to flourish. Other fruits for walls, that need south-facing positions, include plums and pears, even figs in the really warm parts of the country.