The Unlimited Opportunities For Decoration Of Vines

Vines are available in an endless variety of size, texture, color, and form, and they can be trained to any shape, line, or curve. Name the decorative purpose your planting should serve, the effect you want to achieve, and take your choice of suitable vines or hanging plants. For dangling down from the edge of an indoor garden or climbing a piece of gnarled driftwood at the back, there are dainties like the creeping fig or the more luxuriant scindapsus. For a big, bold, masculine effect on the wall of a man's study or a tropical patio, there are a great number of astonishing philodendrons and monsteras. For airy, lacy shadow effects, there are annuals like the canary-bird vine, succulents like the ceropegias.

For filling the bare space between a tall plant and its planter and relating each to the other, use any number of attractive trailers. For shading or screening a porch or patio, choose heavy-textured vines like the Dutchman's pipe, lighter types like akebia. For evergreen vines of winter beauty, you can have small-leaved euonymous or handsome ivies; for brilliant fall color, parthenocissus or grapevines. There are dwarf vines and giants; vines with waxy foliage, or subdued and velvety; vines with colorful flowers or berries, or both; those that grow rampant or modest and restrained. There are magnificent climbing roses and clematis; exotic passion flowers and bougainvilleas - and all kinds of trailing plants for hanging baskets and wall brackets.

With such wide, wide variety you have unlimited opportunities for decorating your house and enhancing your grounds and garden. The best approach is to be unlimited - to pass up the usual in favor of your own distinctive taste; to reject the ordinary and strive for the original and striking effect; and most important, to reach out beyond the few familiar vining plants so often seen to the phenomenal number of beautiful vines that are less often known and grown.

Granted, an extensive and varied selection of vines is not always available from seed and plant houses and from nurseries. But here is a situation where demand might increase the supply. If we would ask for a greater variety, even request desired varieties by name, growers would have reason to supply them.

Certain fundamental principles of design are inherent in the decorative use of vines, indoors and out. But they are not unbreakable rules; the words "always" and "never" are not part of the vocabulary. They should be adapted, sometimes even disregarded, in favor of originality and daring.


Here is an important point. Like other arts, landscaping and interior decoration depend primarily on personal opinion and taste. What pleases my eye may not please yours; what appeals to you may "leave me cold." For me, i like to have zz plant in my house. And every personal preference has interest and decorative value. If this were not true, all homes and grounds would look unbearably alike, and life would be dull indeed.

On the other hand, good design begins with artistic principles that should be known and understood before they can be adapted or disregarded entirely. Following them implicitly will lead you into no error; using them as points of departure may develop your flair for decorating.