CAMPSIS RAMBUNCTIOUS
There are some plants you should not grow if your garden is smaller than the state of Delaware. One of them is trumpet vine or Campsis radicans. In the marvelous book, Passalong Plants by southern garden writers Felder Rushing and Steve Bender, the latter refers to trumpet vine as a plant that “brings down the house”–and he means that literally.
The most alluring feature of the trumpet vine is its big, orange trumpet-shaped flowers. A healthy, mature plant produces hundreds, if not thousands, of trumpets at bloom time. Hummingbirds reportedly love them. The ferny green leaflets are attractive in their own right–unless they are trying to twine around your ear while you eat breakfast on your campsis-infested back porch.
Unlike more civilized climbers, trumpet vine needs no help in scaling supports. It grasps anything in its path with insidious little aerial roots. Like the equally notorious English ivy, it will also interrupt its skyward journey to insinuate itself into any available cracks and crevices. Trumpet vine will also root in a microgram of dirt. I am convinced that if my house were made of stone and mortar, the trumpet vine would have found its way inside before now.
I was seduced by Campsis radicans eight years ago when I saw a yellow-flowered one in some magazine or other and sought it out at a local nursery. The plant came in a two-gallon pot with what I thought was a disproportionately large metal stake supporting its woody trunk. Much later I realized that the metal stake was actually disproportionately small for the trumpet vine.
I planted the vine and stake by some trellising on the side of my porch, thinking it might someday deck itself with delectable blooms and drape itself artistically over the railing. The trumpet vine got off to a slow start, but once it got going, there was no stopping it. Every time I looked at it, the vine had grown another two feet upward and five feet outward, forming mounds on the side of the porch. It did everything except bloom.
Of course, the one thing I wanted it to do was bloom, so I resisted the urge to lop it back down to size. I waited and waited as the vine engulfed more of the porch and my house. Finally, it produced two lovely yellowy-orange trumpets. It was standing room only among the pollinating insects as they waited patiently to crawl inside the long-awaited flowers.
Once the flowers fell off, I performed radical surgery on the trumpet vine, lopping off what seemed like one thousand linear feet of vine. The plant regarded my efforts as a sign of affection and surged upward even faster. The trumpet vine and I fought a pitched battle for several years. Every year I was confronted by the same dilemma–if I cut back the vine when common sense dictated, I sacrificed the flowers. If I spared the vine, I condemned myself to a major project when the flowers subsided. No matter what I did, the plant flourished. I began to dislike it and thought about yanking the whole thing out. I figured that it would be much easier to slake my desire for trumpet blossoms by simply hanging a picture of a blooming Campsis radicans over my desk.
But laziness intervened as it often does. I didn’t do a thing to the trumpet vine, save for irregular efforts at discipline, until it was time for the house to be painted. Since the painters could not work around my twining behemoth, I cut it back to about one foot and moved it into a pot away from the staging area. The campsis was untroubled by this and began growing vigorously again. The tiny pieces of campsis root remaining in the soil did their part by sprouting practically under the painters’ feet. I dug them out regularly. By the end of the paint job, the soil on that side of the house looked like a lunar landscape, pock-marked by the indentations from the painters’ ladders and the dimples left behind when I uprooted the stray trumpet vine shoots.
After the workmen departed, I decided that I could control the trumpet vine better if I grew it as a standard. The copious amounts of greenery would make a nice tree-like canopy, I thought, and it would take less pruning because all I would have to do was cut off side shoots that threatened the plant’s new, more manageable shape. I was pretty sure that I had seen a trumpet vine trained as a standard somewhere on the other side of town.
Three years later, the vine is thriving–to say the least–as a standard. It is now four feet tall, with a canopy that is about equally wide. However, if I didn’t clip that canopy regularly, the tree would be four feet tall with a canopy one hundred feet wide. I have given up on flowers until my tree gets taller and can assume the profile of a weeping specimen. I am still uprooting shoots from the area where it was originally installed.
Since transforming my trumpet vine into a standard, I have discovered that the one on the other side of town was not a stand-alone specimen, but had simply engulfed a small maple, completely subsuming the tree’s own foliage.
I am not going to tell you where to purchase a trumpet vine, because I am almost certain that most of you do not have properties larger than the State of Delaware. Save your money and buy yourself a copy of Passalong Plants instead. It is much more entertaining