BEAUTIFUL VINES TO BE FOUND IN OUR WILD WOODS.
As the summer closes and the trees, flowers and vines have all reached their greatest perfection, have fulfilled their mission in life, and in addition have beautified all the spring and summer our lawns and verandas, and have been admired as wonderful children of the florists’ skill, how many of us know that many of them and especially most of these beautiful vines, could be found in our wild woods just for the looking? That we could with our own hands transplant them to our homes and have just as beautiful vines on our little porches and verandas as any millionaire on our boulevards?
One vine that we see covering our stateliest mansions and growing over our most humble little cottage, is common in all the woods of the United States from Maine to Florida, from New York to California, is the Ampelopsis quinquefolia—or Virginia creeper—American ivy or woodbine—its name changing with the portion of the country you happen to be when you find it, for we see it frequently under its various names in cultivation, and it certainly grows in great abundance and in the most graceful ways in our woods, over trees and shrubs and old rock fences, clinging in the most loving way to any surface with which it comes in contact. It belongs to the order Vitaceæ or Vine family, which is a family of climbing shrubs, and to which all of our wild grapes belong.
Its name Ampelopsis is from two Greek words, meaning vine and appearance; quinquefolia, five leaved or fingered; its leaves being alternate and compound, with five leaflets, long and pointed, radiating from the center. It may be that it was meant to signify that our five fingers may handle it recklessly and not run any risk of poisoning, as so many people are fearful of being—they being unable to distinguish it from the Rhus radicans or poison ivy—which belongs with the sumachs, and has only three leaflets or divisions in its leaves. This poison ivy could be so easily exterminated if every one who finds a plant of it would dig it up and burn it. It surely is as much one’s duty to help exterminate a poisonous plant as it is to cultivate and nourish an ornamental, beautiful, harmless one. Yet there is hardly a park in our larger cities where you will not find the Rhus radicans or poison ivy growing.
In the Virginia creeper we will find tendrils growing from the base of its leaves, that swell at their tips into sucker like disks, by means of which the plant clings firmly to walls and trees in its extensive climbing. The flowers of this beautiful vine are small, inconspicuous and greenish in color, with five concave thick spreading petals, with a calyx slightly five toothed, a two celled ovary or seed vessel, each cell containing two seeds. It blooms early in June and in the early autumn, when its leaves are turning the most exquisite shades of scarlet and crimson, these little flowers develop into clusters of deep blue or purple berries about the size of peas.
The whole vine is really more beautiful in the autumn than it is in the spring, and it surely does more than its part in making our American woodlands such great expanses of gorgeous coloring in the fall as to attract the attention and remarks of all visiting foreigners.
Miss J. O. Cochran.