Tiny Tuesday : : Tendrils

Vines are surprisingly successful plants. This Passiflora is especially successful. It started as a small plant next to our bedroom door, but It kept trying to grow into our bedroom, so we removed it when we built a new deck there. We didn't fully appreciate how tenacious it is. A part of the plant that we missed grew under  the deck and began trying to grow through our office window. It was reprieved by it's spectacular flowers, and we began training it onto the top of an arbor at the corner of the house.

It is now covering half the arbor providing shade and beautiful flower filled foliage which trails over the edge. We still have to hack it out of the bamboo and the television satellite on the corner of the roof, but inputs most of its effort into creating shade on the arbor. We have another arbor upon which we are trying to grow wisteria and roses, , but they are not nearly as eager to oblige as the passiflora.

I have photographed almost every part of this vine before. Here  is the first one I did.It continues to fascinate me, so today I tried to capture the tendrils which reach out in every direction looking for something to latch onto. If it doesn't encounter something fairly quickly,  it begins circling, creating spring like spirals. I'm sure there is a trigger for this to start happening. In fact, there is probably a good metaphor for the whole process…something about growing inward instead of reaching out….

We went down to Cottage Garden Nursery with Dana this afternoon.  It is beautifully landscaped and curated, filled with interesting plants, rusting metal sculptures, well behaved dogs and all kinds of garden decor. After about an hour, OilMan announced that he was rapidly reaching the angle of repose on what he could do by himself in our garden. He is an engineer and I have lived with him for fifty three years, so I know what the angle of repose is….You could read more than you ever wanted to know about it in Wallace Stegner's excellent book by the same name.

Thank you, Walking Wombat for organizing this challenge and keeping us up to date on who is currently hosting.