jeepers creepers!
by Valari Jack

Vines provide serene privacy while thriving in a wide range of conditions and producing a multitude of flowers. Here are some great picks for your yard.

“Picture the Garden of Eden, before Eve discovered the apple tree. It must have been a secluded oasis of harmony and peace, filled with tantalizing fragrances and shimmering plants of all descriptions. That’s the mythical retreat we try to recreate in our gardens by making the most of nature.

One creative way to fulfill that vision is through vines. All vines provide a maximum display of flowers or foliage while taking up very little ground area. They can also act as living privacy fences, attract wildlife and produce delightful fragrances.

Dozens of vines thrive in our climate, and there are just as many ways to use them in a home landscape. Annual vines, like morning glories and hyacinth bean vine, can create airy and colorful seasonal “walls” for added privacy or shade on a porch or patio. Perennial vines, such as silver lace vine and Virginia creeper, can blanket bare garage walls or unattractive chain-link fences. And many perennial vines, like clematis, trumpet creeper and grape vines, provide color, fragrance and pleasure for decades.

For visual impact, try mixing and matching vines. Grown together, climbing roses and clematis offer stunning displays of pink and purple, crimson and fuchsia. A fun project is to make a tepee out of bamboo poles held together by wire. It provides a support structure for mixing colorful vines and a playful hideaway for kids.

Annual Vines

Your first gardening memory might have been watching an annual vine like morning glory twine rapidly up strings to offer blue flowers to the matching summer sky.

The morning glory (Ipomoea spp.) species offers other plants besides the familiar ‘Heavenly Blue’ morning glory. The nighttime version is the moonflower vine, with large white flowers that open in the evening to fill the night air with intense fragrance. A more recent cultivar is ornamental sweet potato vine (Ipomoea batatas). It’s wonderful in hanging containers, with leaves ranging from chartreuse to almost black. Nasturtiums, with their edible orange and yellow flowers and peppery leaves, and black-eyed Susan vine also thrive in containers.

The canary bird vine is not well known, but deserves popularity. On 10-foot-long vines, it produces orchid-like flowers of bright yellow that bloom from July to the first frost. Allowed to grow across and through other plants, like lavender or salvia, its fringed flowers and lettuce-green leaves make a lively contrast in color and texture.

Another beauty is the scarlet runner bean, cultivated at Monticello by Thomas Jefferson. It produces a blaze of color and hummingbird-attracting flowers that turn to scarlet-colored edible beans. The hyacinth bean offers white flowers and shiny purple seedpods on vines that grow up to 20 feet in full sun.

Perennial Vines

When you include roses in the list of perennial vines and climbers that thrive in Colorado, the number of choices rises to the dozens. While climbing or rambling roses don’t twine by nature, they use their thorns to hook onto anything nearby.

Once tied to trellises or other support structures, roses such as ‘Paul’s Himalayan Musk’ or ‘Lawrence Johnston’—a vigorous bloomer with abundant pale yellow roses—will rapidly climb to between 15 and 25 feet. In season, ‘Lawrence Johnston’ prominently stars in the rose garden outside Boulder’s Dushanbe Teahouse. Many roses bred as large-flowered climbers are repeat bloomers that come in an enormous range of colors, including deep red, pink, golden apricot and pure white.

Clematis, another classic perennial vine, offers as many choices in color and size as roses. The most familiar variety is ‘Jackmanii,’ with large deep-purple flowers that bloom all summer. Most clematis will easily grow through lilacs and other bushes, as well as along fences and hedges. Any clematis with well-shaded roots and a sunny location will thrive, often for generations.

Virginia creeper is an omnipresent vine that doesn’t get noticed much until autumn, when its brilliant red foliage catches the eye. It’s a rampant climber, easily growing up walls and around trees. It produces shiny dark berries in late fall, not edible for people, but appreciated by birds.

Silver lace vine is another rapidly growing vine, earning its reputation as the mile-a-minute vine. In late summer, it covers and spills over local fences with billowing clouds of white panicles.

Trumpet vines are hardy and vigorous, ideal for covering sturdy trellises or making a green and colorful wall. Hummingbirds are attracted to trumpet vines because of their masses of orange-red, trumpet-shaped flowers produced from midsummer to autumn.

While wintercreeper (Euonymous fortunei) is better known as a ground cover, it can grow to 10 feet or more in contact with walls or other supports. The glossy green leaves are evergreen and shade tolerant. Late in the season, the small fruits open to reveal bright-orange seeds against the leaves.

And don’t overlook grapes, which thrive successfully in this region. A few vines can cover an arbor in a season or two, providing fruit and a shady place on a hot day.

Other interesting vines not yet common here are Dutchman’s pipe, with small flowers that resemble meerschaum pipes; porcelain berry vine, which produces small, shiny berries of purple, blue, lavender and light green; and American bittersweet, with yellow-orange fruit and scarlet berries in winter.

Vines can twine and climb in endless ways through a garden. Perhaps they can even screen that apple tree and keep you gardening in delightful innocence.


Valari Jack is an avid gardener, a CSU Cooperative Extension master gardener, and a freelance photographer and writer who lives in Boulder.

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