Ipomoea

The rampant chartreuse vine spilling from planters all over New York is Ipomoea ‘Marguerite,’ aka the Sweet Potato Vine.

A lot of people started planting Marguerite about 10 years ago, but I can’t quite get used to her as a rank and file member of our flora. She’s a dominatrix, and her vigor has a supernatural, mutant-Kudzu quality. Still I use her in new plantings all the time because she makes a fast start and gives everyone the impression that they know what they are doing. Marguerite is a tender tropical, and fortunately she’s laid flat by the first frost.

There are a few other Ipomoeas, including black leaved ones that can be used to macabre effect. “Blackie” has a divided leaf and nice violet flowers that resemble morning glory, which is in the same genus. I’ve never noticed flowers on other Ipomoeas.

‘Carolina Bronze’ has an interesting bronze brown leaf that mixes poorly with most other plants. I’ve liked seeing it grown with Coleus ‘Trailing Red’ and the scarlet dahlia with dark leaves called ‘Bishop of Llandaff.’ It also looks good at the base of big blue-leafed agaves. Generally Carolina lends herself to sophisticated, highly edited planting schemes of foliage in muted pastels.

‘Tricolor’ is just awful. Its leaf is green mottled with white, lavender and pink.

I think we are just getting started with Ipomoea. New varieties are introduced every year, including one marketed as a more “restrained” version of Marguerite.

Ivy

I love ivy grown up trees. English ivy is dark, evergreen and macabre. It lends an elegiac, Hubert Robert sort of melancholy to the scene. When I die, I want a grave marked with a slate headstone in a country cemetery with black locust trees clothed in ivy. Wrought iron fences, bearded iris, yuccas on a lawn that goes brown in the summer. I imagine an atmosphere of dereliction that invites reverie and mischief.

Boston ivy is another story. It is bright and glossy and shimmers in the breeze. In high summer it drapes from branches in great luxuriant swags. It turns a vibrant crimson in autumn.

Ivy does not hurt the trees. Some people get upset when they see ivy in trees, but they should realize that they grown together in nature and that a bit of ivy does no harm.

Wisteria

I can pretty easily forgo planting most of the species that appear on the invasive plant lists for our area. There are sore temptations, like the Tea Viburnum. And several garden stalwarts, like English Ivy, are frankly irreplaceable.

But forgoing Wisteria is a brutal challenge. No vine matches its combination of exuberance and refinement.

I went around with the illusion that only the Japanese Wisteria, Wisteria floribunda, was invasive. (I failed to read the fine print on the Invasive Plant Council of New York State’s list.) The Chinese Wisteria, I believed, was safe and almost as good: a little less elegant and a little less fragrant, but with bronzy new leaves that set off the flowers. I took this picture of Wisteria sinensis on Fire Island to show that we can keep our bearings with invasive plants without compromising our appetite for Wisteria.

Then I double checked and found that the Chinese Wisteria is equally invasive. This a real blow because the recommended substitute, the American Wisteria frutescens, doesn’t make the same gorgeous show. It’s a nice enough vine, but I’d have a hard time planting it without feeling compromised.

Over the years I’ve shilly-shallied a bit on the question of invasive plants. I’m outraged that my beloved Black Locust is on the list when its nativity is in question. I’ve wondered about the actual harm of growing invasive plants in gardens if they are already loose in the woods. And I’ve thought the whole issue is a little misplaced because there are no unspoiled native ecosystems left to defile.

But gradually I’ve become a fundamentalist on the question. Because of choices gardeners have made euonymus and barberry have crowded the native shrubs from our woods. It was an innocent mistake, but now we know better. There are vastly complicated environmental problems that we can only begin to solve, but the problem of invasive plants belongs to gardeners and we should own it.

BTW I use the invasive plant list provided by the Brooklyn Botanic Garden:

http://www.bbg.org/gar2/pestalerts/invasives/worst_nym.html