How to Choose Trellises and Supports for Climbing Plants

How to Choose Trellises and Supports for Climbing Plants

Spend a week or two touring flower gardens, and you’ll come home with a whole new appreciation for how climbing plants can enhance a garden. Everywhere you turn the walls are covered with roses and climbing hydrangeas; the trees and shrubs are threaded with clematis; pergolas, arches and fences are draped in honeysuckle and ivies; obelisks and tripods are woven with sweet peas, morning glories and thunbergia; passion vines, jasmine, mandevillea and bougainvillea fill pots and planters of every shape.

Three things to consider when selecting a trellis:
Choose supports that are sturdy enough for the vines you want to plant. Supports should be made of weatherproof materials (such as galvanized or powder-coated steel, painted or treated wood), especially if you are planting a perennial vine.
Also think about whether you want the support — as well as the plant — to be a decorative garden feature, or if the support’s only job is to show off the plant. Decorative plant supports can serve as interesting focal points in the garden (arbors marking an entryway, an obelisk marking the end of a pathway), or can provide a sense of enclosure by screening views and/or delineating boundaries (fences, trellis panels, walls, pergolas).
And last, think about what kinds of plants you want to grow. A climbing rose requires a different type of support than a sweet pea; pole beans need a different support from a tomato or cucumber plant. To learn more about which types of supports suit which types of plants, read How Plants Climb.

Here are seven choices, both functional and decorative.
Arches:
These structures can add distinctive flair to your garden, no matter what the season. Design and placement are critical. Spend some time in your garden determining what style and scale structure would be compatible with your house and landscape. These structures are most often made of wood, which can be painted or stained to resist the elements. Steel and plastic versions are also available, and are a smart choice if the style suits your garden.

Flat trellises:
These are often used to define a space or provide a sense of privacy. They may be freestanding, or can be anchored to a wall or posts. Sometimes permanently located, they are also relatively easy to move around the garden if you want to try out different effects. Examples of flat trellises would be wood lattice panels, metal trellises of various kinds, and those made of plastic mesh.

Obelisks, tripods and teepees:
Both functional and decorative, these structures add a strong vertical element that can serve as a focal point in the garden. Like exclamation points, they’re most effective when not overused. Make sure the structure is tall enough to support the type of plant you want to grow. Scarlet runner beans and vigorous varieties of morning glories, for instance, want a support that’s 8 to 10 feet tall; they’ll quickly overpower a 4-foot tripod. Bamboo canes make inexpensive and attractive teepees for the vegetable garden.

Cages and ladders:
Vegetable supports should be sturdy and made of durable materials, and tall enough for the plants they’ll support. Choices include a traditional cage, a tower, a teepee, or a ladder.

Our new Vertex Lifetime Tomato Cage is available for both compact (determinate) tomato varieties as well as tall-growing (indeterminate) tomato varieties.

encing and porches:
There are climbers to suit almost every type of fencing you can imagine—even chain-link fences. Climbing roses look beautiful draped over a post-and-rail fence. When they get a little help from strings or plastic netting, sweet peas look terrific growing against a picket fence. Porch railings and banisters can be wrapped with plastic trellis netting.

Walls:
Not many of us have beautiful 10-foot-high walls of aged brick around our gardens. But you might consider growing plants on one wall of your house, the wall of an outbuilding, or the “wall” of a neighbor’s fence. There are a couple options for training plants against a wall. Clinging plants like Boston ivy, can attach themselves to almost any wall with no other support necessary. Most other plants will need to attach themselves to a wall-mounted trellis or a system of wires and eye bolts.

One last idea from England that’s super-easy: Try growing a climber up through an existing shrub or tree. Clematis are ideal for this job. Years ago, I planted Clematis ‘Henryii’ at the base of a white birch. At first I had to help it up with some strings, but it quickly found its way into the branches above and every year, it puts on a stunning display with its huge white flowers. Clematis are also happy to thread their way through shrub roses and lilacs. Another plant that I often saw growing up through hedges was Tropaeolum, also known as canary creeper. If your climate is temperate enough, passion vines are also good weavers.