Take advantage of all that vertical space in your garden! Most American gardens are too focused at ground level, with plants no more than 3 or 4 feet high. Flowering vines are easy to grow and can do so much for your landscape. Most require very little maintenance. Most need only a little pruning now and then.

Need to disguise something in a yard? Maybe it’s a rusty metal garden shed or an old stump needing camouflage or a desire for more privacy around the jacuzzi or patio area. Let flowering vines create the screening needed while adding walls of vertical show stopping blooms! Many varieties have highly fragrant blooms too. Just imagine a warm summer evening out on the patio with the scents of Passion Flower and Honeysuckle drifting on the breeze. How romantic!

Vines can also create focal points and accents in a landscape. They can scramble up nearly anything that will support them. Plant a honeysuckle where it can cling to the posts of the front porch or stoop and enjoy heady fragrance every morning and evening. Plant a clematis under the mailbox and let the vine climb all over the mailbox post for a burst of color at the end of the driveway. Place a column support in the center of a flower bed and train a vine to take center stage and add depth and height.

Another great use of flowering vines is to help define garden "rooms". Different areas of a yard can be separated into garden rooms by color of bloom or type of plant. Arbors, arches, trellises and pergolas add architectural elements to the garden. This creates interest and the feeling of truly being enveloped in an environment. Use archways and arbors to separate the flower beds from the vegetable garden. Perhaps one garden room is filled entirely with roses. An archway teeming with black eyed susan vine (Thunbergia alata) would set them off beautifully.

Many flowering vines like morning glories (ipomoea) and cup and saucer vine (Cobaea scandens) are annuals easily grown from seeds in the spring. Others such as the clematis, honeysuckles (Lonicera periclymenum)and passion flowers (Passiflora caerulea) are perennials and will return year after year. Some vines get quite large and require heavy-duty supports while others thrive in containers with a small trellis to climb on. The possibilities are endless.

When choosing a vine, pay careful attention to its light requirements and the strength of the support it will need. Be sure to note the direction in which it twines. Some vines twine around their support in a clockwise directions and others twine counterclockwise. This will aid in training the vine to its support.

The blossoms of flowering vines come in an infinite array of sizes, colors, shapes and fragrances. Your local Southern States dealer can suggest the plants and seeds that are best suited to your area.