Thursday, September 03, 2009

Ruthless beauty

These are not honeysuckle, like I first thought, but creeping trumpet vine. Their scent is sweet like honeysuckle and they attract hummingbirds. They can also easily grow out of control.

According to Wikipedia: “Trumpet vine grows well on arbors, fences, telephone poles, and trees, although it may dismember them in the process. Ruthless pruning is recommended.”

Seems like good advice -- sometimes a little "ruthless pruning" is just what we need to do...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Clifford Brown played this exact
shade of trumpet
vine -
believed honeysuckle
even by his sublime
time
keeper -
so when a late night car
crash murdered
him/
no trumpet vine
assumed that Brown
but crept
looking for its lost
creator

Katie said...

I've definitely seen these out-of-control flowers around Berkeley. These are a pretty color; it would be so hard to ruthlessly prune them!

Ms M said...

Anon, I love how you linked the photo to jazz. Excellent!

Katie, they do seem to be very hardy flowers. I've seen them in the Midwest, too, where they seem to spread doubly fast. But it is hard to prune something that's lovely...