Here at Wayside Gardens, we always appreciate being mentioned by newspapers.  I especially enjoyed this article in the San Francisco Chronicle, because it recommended us as a source for trumpet vines.  I’m a great lover of flowering vines, so that put a big smile on my face.  I suspect that my love for flowering vines comes from growing up looking forward each year to the Wisteria blooming all over town.  Every spring pine groves all over town explode into purple, and the purple flowers hang thick on almost every tree up and down the older streets.  They stick around for much of the summer, but here Wisteria and Daffodils mean spring has arrived, and all the flowers of the season will be following soon behind.

As I’ve grown older, though, I’ve grown to love all sorts of flowering vines.  The hummingbirds love my trumpet vine (a Campsis ‘Mme. Galen’) that’s happily climbing a sunny wall at my mother’s house, and I’ve been lovingly tending some pink rose vines on an arching lattice for years now. 

Over the years I’ve had several Clematis vines (it’s almost an addiction, with so much variety of both color and shape), but I think that my current favorite is my Clematis Bourbon.  My sister loves to steal my flowers and float them in a crystal bowl of water as a centerpiece.  Fortunately, it produces so many flowers throughout the summer that I don’t mind.  Even after years of propagating flowering vines, though, I still get a thrill each year when I first spot those wonderful amethyst Wisteria vines for the first time, and it’s still my favorite vine by far.

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