Soften Surfaces With Trained Vines

By Guest

Restful and easy-to-live-with as they are, vines are not at their best trained haphazardly on a wall – any available wall – the way paintings are often hung to fill an empty space.

The lines of vines are so prominent that using them in a by-guess-and-by-golly manner can cause confusion and even offense. Except for spectacular specimens that become focal points wherever they’re placed, vines are usually most effective used in combination with other plants or items like pictures, mirrors, pieces of furniture.

But used with care, vines can create breathtaking effects against walls, fireplaces, railings of stairs, and other vertical areas. To harmonize and connect a background – the wall – with a table or chair standing before it, hang or train a vine just above the furniture. Stand back and squint at the composition to see if it is balanced. Check the relative proportions of space, to furniture, to plant. Decide whether the shapes are harmonious, whether colors and textures have interesting contrast. Then, congratulate yourself on achieving one of the difficult but most artistic types of interior design.

Or arrange a vine with or around a mirror that reflects the image and doubles the effect. To lower a high ceiling, train a vine horizontally at some point above eye level; try the reverse with vertical lines. Experiment with breaking up a large, bare surface with the line, light, and shadow effect of a vine.

Available variety of suitable vines, of course, depends partly on cultural conditions. Walls are not usually brightly lighted, so foliage vines are used for their fresh greenery and the pattern of leaf, stem, and shadow. Small, slow-growing varieties are out of scale on large walls; massive, heavy vines are too dominant for limited areas. Some clinging vines will climb a smooth wall without support; stem-and tendril-climbers need cord or wire. Take all these qualities into consideration, then take off on one of the following suggestions or a creative idea of your own.

In a living room corner where a rough stone fireplace joins a wall of smooth plaster or paneling, the abrupt change can be softened and the two surfaces blended by a soft foliage vine trained up to the ceiling and across the top of the second wall. Fatshedera would do well here, or some of the climbing philodendrons.

In the bathroom, where the air is moist so it can have guttation in plants, tropical climbers will grow faster and cling tighter even to smooth walls. Try a flat-clinging variety up the side of the shower. In the library or TV room, cut a hole in the top of a bookcase, just large enough to hold a pot by the rim. Provide a plant-to-ceiling support like a thin, straight tree trunk or moss pole, and let several variegated scindapsus cover it with white-splashed, overlapping leaves.

On the fireplace mantel, avoid the trite matching bowls of ivy. Try one large, low, centered container overflowing with nephthytis, or balance a tall candelabra at one end against a low, spreading asparagus fern at the other.

In a contemporary house I know, the wall dividing living room from kitchen stops two feet short of the ceiling. On top, the talented home decorator sets a bowl from which long stems of garden ivy hang down to break up the broad expanse of bare wall. When the ivy fades, she replaces it with potted philodendrons or other foliage vines, sometimes balanced by a bark-mounted staghom fern.

Now is the time to answer your questions on guttation in plants. Visit our evergrowing library at http://www.plant-care.com/crying-plants.html.

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Topics: Gardening | Comments Off

Tags: garden, Gardening, Home Improvement, plant care

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