HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 373 



year around. For this reason the bittersweet has come to be called 

 the American Holly. 



The Virginia Creeper, is the finest of all vines for house porches, 

 from the greater beauty of its leaves, and its superior capacity for 

 clinging. The bittersweet can only climb where it finds a support 

 to coil around. The creeper has fine tough tendrils like the grape 

 that can either hook on to a small support, a nail, a splinter, a peg, 

 etc., or oenetrate a crevice. It can thus creep over the sides and 

 along the eaves and roofs of buildings and run up any rough barked 

 tree. Its leaves are delicate in form, of a deep glossy green in the 

 growing season, and in early autumn of a lovely crimson hue, com- 

 mencing to don their gay attire before the frost, as if in joyful 

 haste to complete the small cycle of their lives and close it with 

 gay banners flying in token of triumph in survival of their perpet- 

 uating seeds, now beyond the reach of injury and ready for distri- 

 bution. 



There are peculiar contrasts between the Virginia creeper, the 

 grape and the bitter sweet in their native wilds. The grape, as I 

 have said, loves live wood to climb on, but will go up on anything 

 it can tie its tendrils to. The creeper prefers a dead or decaying 

 tree or branch — like the English Ivy, 



" Creeping where no life is seen, 

 Oh a rare old plant is the Ivy green." 



The bitter sweet and grape are more abundant in the woods, 

 because they can climb on any sort of growing shrub or tree. In 

 looking for the creeper then, you must search for trees of very 

 rough, creviced bark. The grape and creeper love the warm, sunny 

 spots the best; the bittersweets inclines to the cooler slopes. Plant 

 them together, and the bittersweet will clasp the other two in Ana- 

 conda coils of death. Plant the grape and creeper together, and 

 they will mingle fraternally. Plant the two side by side, with a 

 live tree in front of the creeper, and a dead one in front of the 

 grape, and they will cross over — the grape seeking the live sup- 

 port, the creeper the other. For this they seem endowed with a 

 quality equivalent to sight or sense. I tried a few years ago to 

 train a Virginia creeper to run from our house porch to a large 

 oak tree standing a few feet distant; gave it a line and tied its leader 

 in the direction to reach the nearest parallel branch of the oak. It 

 grew a little and shot off sidewise towards a more distant branch. 

 1 tied it again, and again it grew out and angled off, holding up 

 its leader in the air as if reaching for something it wanted. I then 

 discovered that it was pointing to a limb that was partly dead, and 

 surrendered to its evident preference, when after I had strung the 

 line where it wanted to go, it got there expeditiously. It would 

 have spanned the gap all the same by its own process of bridge- 

 building, though at a slower pace than by direct advance on the 

 line. Here again the observer can see something akin to intellig- 

 ence in the climbing vines. On the side of the house we now live 

 in, we have trained a grape — a volunteer plant we took a fancy to 

 protect. Having secured a firm hold for some twenty feet along 



