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.

Sometimes classic is, well, classical: Timesless, satisfying in any age—at any age—and in any style.
Years ago I misjudged what a particular client would like, and so wound up, happily, owning a trio of pencil-thin yews. Handsome in their own right, yes, but also perfect scaffolding for a particular clematis, Lady Murasaki.
Sure, the flowers are stunning.
Every blue clematis is stunning. Lady Murasaki isn't just a beauty, though, she's a cosmopolite. (Thank goodness she ain't named Big Bertha from Biloxi.) She fits in to the local culture, even though she never looks anything but her best all the while. Does she grow bigger and bigger, year by year? Of course not: Then she'd swamp the yews, shading them out at worst, or growing over them into a quivering clematisy haystack—albeit one with stunning blue flowers—at best. No way for a Lady to behave.
But instead, Lady M consents to be pruned down in earliest Spring, right to the lowest leaf buds. Yes, then, down to a foot or less. (This makes her a Group B clematis. Group A's don't need to be pruned at all, and Group C's are a disaster unless you prune them in Spring ruthlessly. Group B's swing both ways. If you want them more compact, prune in the Spring. If not, they grow larger and larger, but still bloom beautifully.)
Lady M thanks me immediately for my attention, putting out joyful shoots that race to the top of the yew, but not much farther...
...and are covered in those same stunning blue flowers. Some years Lady M is so happy about all of this that she flowers again in September, after the high Summer heat has broken, the nights are starting to cool, and she can collect her thoughts again.
Eventually, the yews will get so tall—ten feet, even fifteen—that Lady M will only be able to frisk them as high as their, shall we say, beltloops. I'll still do her Spring pruning, otherwise she would have very long skinny legs with narry a flower until six feet or more off the ground. And that's no way for me to treat a Lady.
And besides, if I'm faithful to her in my pruning, she'll be faithful to me in her compact and floriferous growth.  When the yews are twelve feet tall, the effect will still be marvelous: they'll look like a psychedelic boy- band from the 60's in blue-flowered pants. Hmmm: Boy-bands in blue-flowered pants: I need that in my garden. You too, yes?

With "only" an acre and a half, and many hundreds of plants to explore, experiment with, and enthuse over, there's not an inch to spare. Can this one be a groundcover to that one? Can this one peak in Spring and then go dormant, so that that one can grow up, peaking in August, in the very same spot?
With every spot and almost every plant doing such double duty, each tree is paired with some sort of climbing or sprawling plant. Why be just a tree when you can also be a scaffold?
The property came with this old star magnolia—the right two-thirds of all that foliage above the fence between me and my tedious neighbor—whose hundreds of white flowers are a welcome thrill in April. But then, just green leaves from May to October? No way, Jose. If a tree is, oh, twenty feet tall and wide, then it needs to play host to a vine that also gets, oh, twenty feet tall and wide. And one that blooms when the tree doesn't.
Like this unusual white clematis.
I planted it six feet to the left of the magnolia trunk... ...and guided it up a bamboo pole until it could grab onto the magnolia canopy. And six weeks after the magnolia's April flowers are only a faint memory—June in other words—it starts to bloom.
At first, it seems like Autumn clematis. But this is June not September.  And the flowers are twice as big.

This is Clematis 'Paul Farges', AKA Clematis fargesii, AKA (yuck) Clematis potaninii variorum potaninii. For a couple of years I wasn't sure just where up in the canopy it was heading...

...but then, from the second floor windows, I saw the flowers almost up at the top of the magnolia.

See?  The white patch of flowers at the center?

This Paul Farges is still but a stripling, and adolescent.  It has many yards to climb, many more branches to explore. Why not have the entire magnolia spangled with its white blossoms?
To help Paul get the jump on more of the magnolia, I found this side tendril trudging dutifully atop the groundcovering mayapple, heading right toward the magnolia trunk at the right.
It's better not to have the tendril grab onto the trunk itself: Then it would climb up right into the deep shade at the center of the canopy. Slow going in that darkness I'm sure. Better to guide it further, then, to the sunnier outer shell of foliage at the opposite side of the tree.
So I rigged up bamboo "aide-de-hauteur" for it to climb up. It just reaches. Grab on, sweetie!
The tendril should be high enough by August to begin pole vaulting up into the magnolia canopy on its own.
By 2011, the magnolia should be spangled on both sides, right and left, fore and aft.

And by, who knows?, 2014, the entire magnolia will seem to bloom in April—and then bloom again in June, July, August, & September, but with entirely different flowers.

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.