Ah, 100 degrees yesterday, and just about that today. Time to do anything that must be done in the shade. Like—lookey here!—hanging around under the Red Garden pergola, with this display of amazing wisteria pods.
Oh yes, wisteria pods. The vine is a huge woody cousin of garden peas, which get pods too. With edible seeds inside. (The peas you ninny.) Wisteria seeds aren't edible, but wisteria pods have it all over pea-pods for visuals: Six inches long, with a hard, velvety-suede green shell.
And dangling from the flower-cluster stem that, in this variety at least...

...can be one, ...two, ...three,
....even four feet long. Now that's a dangle. But the real shocker isn't that there's one or two such pods on most of the flower stems.
In bloom, each stem has a couple of hundred flowers in voluptuous pendancy.

Why then aren't there a couple of hundred wisteria pods on each stem, not one or two. (Each flower that is successfully pollinated matures to a single pod with, yes, however many seeds in it. One flower : one pod.) Maybe those gorgeous seductive flowers aren't very fertile. Or maybe because this is a Chinese wisteria, there isn't quite the right species of insect to pollinate it here in North America? More likely: The plant doesn't want hundreds of seed pods on one flower stem because their combined weight would, surely, rip the flower stem right off the vine long before any one of the pods had matured to viable seeds.
In any event, no one ever breeds wisteria for a better crop of pods. The breeding is all about larger flowers in longer clusters in more unusual colors. The pods, such as they are, are just what happens afterwards.
Garden peas, by contrast, are all about the quantity of pods and the peas in each. It's the reverse priority from wisteria: pea flowers are only the means to those oh-so-desirable—and—delicious pea pods. No wonder, then, that garden peas are comparatively prolific "podders".
It also helps that garden peas are annuals; any one plant lives for only a few months. So if you don't produce plenty of peas—all the peas that your human gardeners might ever want—they'll plant some other variety of pea next year, and you'll be history. Wisteria, by contrast, can live for generations. And even one vine has the potential to grow into a monster that ate the whole neighborhood. With that longevity and a Napoleonic, even Hitlerian, sense of entitlement when it comes to more and more real estate, who cares about producing seeds? They'd only sprout into puny seedlings that would take years and years to grow into anything the size of the parent. By which time the parent had gotten twice as big anyway. Wisteria pods? We're lucky to see them at all.

The giant woolly morning-glory has gotten its bearings. I don't set out plants of this immense annual until the weather is truly warm and steady in June, but even so by early August they have climbed the twenty feet of my giant tripod.
It doesn’t bloom until its second year—which means that it doesn’t bloom at all for me here in New England. So it’s all about the ascent, the getting up there, the climb. Which for a morning glory means a twine.  Around and around, in a snake-spiral from bottom to top.

I plant four pots of Giant Woolly in the huge terra-cotta. So I have eight plants total: they come two in a pot. Stay tuned for why, but it’s a statistically-significant group. Their first goal is to find something to climb on. The young vines grow so quickly that they were already nearly a yard tall when I bought them. And they are so thick-stemmed even as youngsters that they completely ignore the string or the pea stake a “normal” morning glory would wrap itself around by tomorrow. Giant Woolly’s are holding out for bigger prey—taller prey actually—and that means thicker prey. The twenty-foot lengths of galvanized pipe that form the tripod are evidently to their liking—they race right up it in about six weeks. But it takes a few days to, so to speak, lead the horse to water. Vines have a sense of touch: They can feel when they are in contact with a likely support, and they seal the deal by spiraling themselves around and around it. On the way up, they feel every inch. All of that waving-around-in-the-breeze stuff, trying this direction then that, disappears after the host is detected and then selected. The tip of the vine now noses right around and around and around the host—in this case the galvanized pipe—with python affection. (Twiners characteristically twine in a spiral that's a bit smaller than the diameter of the host, ensuring a tight fit and minimal slippage.)
But Giant Woolly's are a bit slow on the uptake, so to speak. It isn’t enough for young vine to brush up against or even lean on the pipe at a spot midway down the stem. The sense of touch seems to localize much more toward the tip. So I tie each stem to the pipe loosely with twine every foot or so, right up to the fragile tip.
The tip of this one, which was held closely to the pipe then, has grown six inches more since, and is gratefully hugging the pipe. It was time to set this vine free.
But how do the tips know which way to go? What is it about that steady contact, in this case with the pipe, that helps them "decide"? Does that period of steady contact let the tips, who knows?, take readings from the stars? Track the sun's East-to-West path across the sky for a few days? Sense the lines of magnetic force heading up to the poles? Or is it because the biggest spiral of all—DNA—is, oh yes, all counterclockwise spirals too? However they do it, they determine right from left. Truly: right from left. And then they begin to twine as fast as the available heat and sun and water will allow, and only to the right. (Well, upwards and to the right. But never up and to the left.)
Self-clinging vines, ivy, say, don’t need to know their right from their left. They only need to know up. And then they grow up. Straight up. (They need to know front from back, though, growing their hold-fast roots only out of the front side, the belly of the stem that’s right against the wall or the tree or the house.) Twining vines need to be smarter. It would waste time to switch from clockwise to counterclockwise, to grow right-to-left one week, then left-to-right the next. And besides, maybe in the switchover you’d lose hold—lose your twine, so to speak.
Do other twining vines all grow counterclockwise? Are there vines that are ambidextrous, one plant choosing clockwise, one choosing counterclockwise? What a big life choice: This way? That way? It would be like coming out, and just as full of agony and honesty: I’m clockwise, world, and there’s nothing I can do about it but be proud and happy.
Or is it a North / South Hemisphere thing, like water down the drain: One direction in New York, the opposite in Rio? (Damn, the one time I was in South America, did I think to look? Nope, says The Washington Post: Most vines twine counterclockwise, as indeed do my Giant Woolly's. I have a variety of twiners (you’re not surprised, I hope, on any level?) Honeysuckles, hops, wisterias. I’ll survey the troops and report back.

I haven't been face-to-face with actual marijuana for, oh, 40 years. Tried it, didn't like it. So I was very slow on the draw in realizing that one of my vitex bushes is doing a serious pot imitation.
Here's the bush, putting out its lush eager Spring growth.
A foliage close-up. Look familiar?
And here's a shot of an actual marijuana. (Thank you, Google.)

They are amazingly similar, but pot has more leaflets than vitex. Seven instead of five. And pot leaves are two or three times as big.
But with pot, as with vitex, the puff I mean the proof is in the pudding. When the vitex blooms it gets narrow spikes of tiny lavender-blue flowers, not the odiferous buff-colored clumpy things of marijuana. OK, blue-ish with today's pot-imitating species, Vitex incisa. Perhaps this is the reason that if you only have one vitex, plant what everyone else plants, Vitex heterophylla. Here's one of those in bloom out in Wellfleet. Now that's colorful!
But you know me: If I have one of something, well why not have all of its cousins? So I grow Vitex incisa too. That's one of my, ahem, hardy passion vines, 'Incense', crawling through the vitex, and adding one of its flowers to the picture.
'Incense' is far and away the easiest of the passifloras to establish, and the flowers are are the biggest too.
Incredible. Sun in the Summer, good drainage in the Winter, and you should be able to get some 'Incense' in your garden almost anywhere in Zone 6.
A nice druggy coincidence there. The name if this variety, planted so near my inadvertently pot-like Vitex, really is 'Incense'. Just as incense tried to do with pot in real life (I'm told), this 'Incense' is trying to cover up this "pot." Even better: 'Incense' was developed by the US Government, who was trying to create a hardy passion vine with an agricultural fruit crop. But instead—you can just hear those dweeby DOA guys saying "darn!—all they got was a hardy passion vine with incredible four-inch blue flowers. That still doesn't explain why they named it 'Incense', though. Maybe they were smoking something that day? A thought.

The front of the carriage house faces East, so it misses the hot afternoon sun. What plants are happy with just morning sun? European honeysuckle for one.
It will grow to twenty feet, handles shade or sun... (thank you Clematis.Com for the pic)  
...and has a huge and showy crop of fragrant trumpets.

Thank you Luc Viator for the sparkling pic. It twines, so needs something to climb on. Simple & sturdy is best because the vine will quickly hide the structure under a thick canopy of foliage. i
I fixed a pair of thick rebars to the fascia (the underside of a roof's overhang), anchoring them informally in the ground. Then I wired cross pieces every three feet up, making a huge honeysuckle-friendly ladder. In three or four years, I bet the honeysuckle will have gotten right to the top.
Oh yes: That's not a gravestone at the bottom. When we bought our property, we found this monument (it has a bronze plaque of the prior house-owners, back to the 18th C) leaning against, almost into the wall of the living room. Here by the carriage house it's a bit (but just) more stable.

Clematis recta was once a staple of the June florist trade—i.e., for weddings. Here's why:


1. It blooms then (duh!).

2. The small starry flowers (like autumn clematis) are in large loose clusters, perfect for bouquet filler.

3. As important, Clematis recta doesn't climb or even cling. And the stems sprout up from the roots afresh each Spring. So the long willowy stems (surprisingly strong too) are easy to cut by the armful. Clematis that climb—which is the norm for this huge family—do so via elongated little tendrils off the ends of the leaves. The tendrils wrap around anything in reach, including nearby leaves and stems of the clematis itself. So it's impossible to cut a climbing clematis flower with any amount of stem on it, let alone cut stems by the armful: You'd have to excise each stem leaf-by-leaf. No bride, not for any money, is worth that amount of tedium.


Clematis recta also looks great just growing in the ground, but—and it's a big but—because the stems aren't self-clinging, they get up to about three feet and, if there's nothing around to lean on or grow through, they flop open gracelessly. So grow Clematis recta through a high peony hoop, or near taller shrubs and perennials that can provide casual elbows and shoulders to prop it up. Or have shorter shrubs in front of it over which it can sprawl with enthusiasm; just make them shade-tolerant, because Clematis recta can be a thick and heavy clump. I'd vote for skimmia or low spreading yews.


So far so good. But there's more: Clematis recta very happily mutated so that the new foliage was, for a time at least, deep purple. By the time the flowers come out, the foliage has faded to green. So it's a vine with two cutting options, then: Cut stems earlier in the Spring for the purple foliage, or let the foliage mature to green and then cut stems for the flowers.
Better still, when you cut the stems—or cut the whole clump down to the ground—it grows another crop! And yes, it's purple (for a time) too. My pair of Clem. recta's are so mature that I think I can stand to experiment: I'll cut them to the ground the moment they begin to waver, to get that second crop of stems. If I'm quick with the clippers in high Summer, could I get yet a third crop? I'd be cutting way before the stems were ever old enough to bloom, but for my money the purple foliage is even more interesting than the lovely flowers.


Especially because my cultivar, Midnight Masquerade, is supposed to be even darker and longer-darker than the generic purple strains. We'll see.


Here it is is a week ago or so, still short and bushy and self-supporting. That's purple smoke-bush behind it, whose foliage stays purple all season long.


So no matter what happens with the Clematis—even if, heaven forbid, I let it go straight through to green, to flowering—I'll always have purple foliage in this bed.