Scarlet Runner Bean is so easy and so showy and so, well, scarlet. Great for your Red Garden. (And for mine as well. Why haven't I grown it there already?) But it also comes in a white-flowered form too, so can cavort with style not just enthusiasm when the prevailing colors are yellow or pink or apricot or rose.
And so it is that I have a tripod for White Runner Bean amid the yellow-friendly plantings around the terrace.
As seems to be the habit with me, either my tripods are too short or my vines too tall. The Runner raced up the available eight feet in about a month, and has spent most of August practicing swan dives from the top, cascading down five and six feet at a time.
The view from the second floor shows both the promise of the white flower spikes, and the missed opportunity of the wayward swan-diving stems.
If it had a taller tripod, the flowers would be in view right outside the window. Maybe the vine would sidle over to the window itself.
How can the opportunity be missed?
Next summer I'll poke a twenty-foot length of rebar down the center of the tripod, which will function merely as the first-floor buttress to steady the rebar for the next story's ascent.
PS: Looking over the Wiki entry, I see these many other varieties of Scarlet Runner.
Enorma
Scarlet Runner
Aztec Half-Runner
White Dutch Runner
Case Knife
Black Runner
Painted Lady
Hammond's Dwarf
Lady Di
Pickwick Dwarf
Riley
Scarlet Emperor
Sun Bright
White Lady
Wisley Magic
White Swan
Oh my, what an intrigue: Black Runner? (Probably just the seeds, but maybe the flowers too??) Pickwick Dwarf? (Aha: it sits, not runs: the non-vining Runner.) White Lady, White Swan? (The flowers no doubt.) And what is a "half" runner, and how is that different from being an Aztec Half Runner? (And doesn't Enorma sound like the fat lady at the side show?) Painted Lady is a white & orange bicolor.
I'm thinking that a number of Runners need to strut their stuff in the gardens in 2011.
PPS: This Mexican native has tubers to lift and store just like dahlias. Tuber-grown vines bloom sooner than seed-sown too. I'm on it!
And so it is that I have a tripod for White Runner Bean amid the yellow-friendly plantings around the terrace.
As seems to be the habit with me, either my tripods are too short or my vines too tall. The Runner raced up the available eight feet in about a month, and has spent most of August practicing swan dives from the top, cascading down five and six feet at a time.
The view from the second floor shows both the promise of the white flower spikes, and the missed opportunity of the wayward swan-diving stems.
If it had a taller tripod, the flowers would be in view right outside the window. Maybe the vine would sidle over to the window itself.
How can the opportunity be missed?
Next summer I'll poke a twenty-foot length of rebar down the center of the tripod, which will function merely as the first-floor buttress to steady the rebar for the next story's ascent.
PS: Looking over the Wiki entry, I see these many other varieties of Scarlet Runner.
Enorma
Scarlet Runner
Aztec Half-Runner
White Dutch Runner
Case Knife
Black Runner
Painted Lady
Hammond's Dwarf
Lady Di
Pickwick Dwarf
Riley
Scarlet Emperor
Sun Bright
White Lady
Wisley Magic
White Swan
Oh my, what an intrigue: Black Runner? (Probably just the seeds, but maybe the flowers too??) Pickwick Dwarf? (Aha: it sits, not runs: the non-vining Runner.) White Lady, White Swan? (The flowers no doubt.) And what is a "half" runner, and how is that different from being an Aztec Half Runner? (And doesn't Enorma sound like the fat lady at the side show?) Painted Lady is a white & orange bicolor.
I'm thinking that a number of Runners need to strut their stuff in the gardens in 2011.
PPS: This Mexican native has tubers to lift and store just like dahlias. Tuber-grown vines bloom sooner than seed-sown too. I'm on it!
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