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.

There's a plant for almost every spot, every combination of sun or shade, wet or dry, high or low, rambunctious or reticent. The North side of our house only gets an hour or two of morning sun—which means it's the spot for plants that don't want the hotter, stronger, longer-lasting afternoon sun.
Gold-leaved hops are a rambunctious vine to use with wise caution. On the one hand, the gold foliage is unique in large hardy vines. On the other, the foliage will scorch in all-day or even afternoon-only sun if you live outside a cool cloudy Scotland-like climate. And on the third hand, the vine spreads relentlessly underground (but the runners can be easily pulled up bare-handedly). And on the fourth hand, the vine prefers to climb to twenty even thirty feet, so needs height as well as space, morning sun but not afternoon sun—and diligent control.
OK, I'm up for it. Larger-scale photos on another post. Here's a tendril that has traveled all the way over to a yew.  
The gold of the leaves is harmonizing with the dark green of the yew's older foliage, and the bright green of it's little new-foliage candles.
But this is only the hops-of-that-week look. Unless I yank up out-of-bounds runners, cut off out-of-bounds stems, and in general, beat back the hops with every tool available, it would swamp the yew outright. Not a problem: This bed is also right along the driveway, so it's easy to yank and snip for a minute when I get out of the car.