TWIL: Vines

The last two years I planted hyacinth beans at the feet of the arbor. Year one, it looked great. Year two: I did not cull anything and my attempts to attach the vines to the arbor failed. “We’ll show you what lazy looks like, lazy woman,” and they just flopped on the ground.

This year I noticed that when you plant the vines at the right time and cull them correctly (snip, don’t pull), then things go much more smoothly. At first.

Because a lot of weeds grew in the arbor last year (again, lazy), they also competed with the Hyacinth bean vine and the weeds all tried to come back this year. I was snipping them when I realized they had the same leaf shape as the hyacinth beans I planted last year. The stems were a different color, though. Weird. Eventually I remembered it’s a hyacinth “bean” because it makes huge seed pods … that I was too lazy to clean up last year.

So, little second-generation sprouts all over.

However, in the next few weeks I noticed that while the leaves were the same, one side of the arbor had green stems, and the other had purple.

And the green-stems grew faster, and began to twist up the arbor a week before the purple-stems.

Then Gary hung a bird feeder and stepped squarely on one of my two un-culled green-stems, and that undid all progress on that side. I manually twisted the green stems back where they’d been. I wasn’t too upset … until the next morning when I came out and they had hurled themselves back on the ground in a tantrum.

I sighed. “I thought you were resilient,” I said sadly. “I thought I could count on YOU more than your purple BROTHERS, but I SUPPOSE I was MISTAKEN.” Followed by another, more pointed sigh.

Then, after I re-twisted them back on the arbor, I went inside and researched if second generation beans are sterile or stupid or stubborn or what, and then I learned two things.

• Purple vines and flowers are likely a hybrid, and I don’t know how they make hybrids, if it’s like Gregor Mendel’s peas, but anyway my green-stems should line up with whatever flower color their great-grand-peas had been: probably white or pale pink.
• The second thing I learned was that vines are particular about the direction they twine. It you take a counter-clockwise-twining plant like a hyacinth bean, and try to change its orientation because of your own laziness and ignorance and stupidity, then it will untwine itself out of the clockwise conversion configuration and hurl itself in a heap on the ground until it can bravely start again.

More detailz: Counter-clockwise vines like hyacinth beans slant upward from left to right if you look at them from the side. Hops and scarlet runner beans go the other way.

Oddly, Chinese wisteria goes counterclockwise, while Japanese wisteria twines clockwise. It has nothing to do with the Coriolis effect: all DNA.

So I am looking forward to the arbor next month. Anticipating an ombre effect.