10 of the Best Climbing plants for your garden
Great ideas for the best 10 or more best climbing plants for your garden. Climbing plants for tough areas, shady areas, showy climbing plants and lovely summer annuals. There are climbing plants to suit every garden.
As a group, climbing plants come in all shapes and sizes, perennial, annual, evergreen and deciduous. Climbing plants can be trained up walls, trellis, planted in the border, climbing up obelisk, in containers on the patio. Alternately, a more natural planting is for the climbing plants to scramble around the border.
One point to note. Because climbing plants are usually vigorous, they are also ruthless. This means the climbing plant will often send out tendrils which grab, cling to, and flatten anything growing around it.
If you let the plant have its own way, it will ramble over neighbouring plants. It is best to check its growth, tie it into an obelisk or a structure so it does not swamp everything around which can stunt the growth of neighbouring plants. The everlasting pea is a prime example of this plant behaviour.
The Best climbing plants
Take your pick from a range of climbing plants detailed below. The Passion flower, (image top center) which looks exotic, but is in fact easy to grow and suitable for most gardens with little maintenance,
The popular Clematis group can be more difficult to grow, requiring time, and pruning. There are hundreds of different species to choose from flowering throughout the year.
Don't be put off growing clematis as they are spectacular climbing plants and help is at hand with more information about Clematis and pruning made easy and videos on planting and pruning Clematis.
Here are some of the best climbing plants with links to pages with additional information.
This climber is easy to grow, deciduous and shade tolerant. The Climbing Hydrangea is an ideal climber for a shady wall. It has lovely white flowers in late spring and early summer. It is vigorous, and self clinging.
Honeysuckle is a woodland plant which means it prefers to be planted with its roots in the shade, away from full sun, and not, as is often the case, near a wall which is just too hot and dry. Honeysuckle has a wonderful, sweet scent, including the deliciously scented Winter Flowering Honeysuckle.
Clematis is a very popular climber. With so many varieties, there is one suitable for every garden. Such is the range of clematis you can have one in flower almost all the year round. Clematis have particular planting, growing and pruning requirements and the clematis pages are full of information and videos.
Passion flower looks exotic looking, but it is fully hardy and in most gardens it is also easy to grow. It is an evergreen, or semi-evergreen climber depending on the growing conditions. This purple variety P. caerulea is hardy in most areas.
Ipomoea is a tender annual, which is usually germinated from seed each year. It has trumpet-shaped flowers in shades of blue, pink and pastels, but it is difficult to grow, especially in cooler gardens or poor summers. It needs plenty of warmth to flower well.
This Jasmine is deciduous and really easy to grow. As its name suggest it is Winter flowering, lifting the gloom in December, January and February. It is very tough and suitable to grow almost anywhere in the garden.
Also known as 'Mile a Minute plant ' for Fallopia is a very fast-growing climber. This plant comes with a health warning as it is just so rampant; plant with caution in a big space. To its credit, Fallopia has lovely white flowers in late summer.
Easy to grow Ivy is very tough and which makes it ideal to plant in difficult areas. This type of ivy is also good for wildlife, providing late nectar for bees and home to many insects. It makes good groundcover and is evergreen ideal for disguising problem areas,
Sweet peas are wonderfully scented annual climber, producing lots of blooms over a long period throughout the summer. Sweet peas make great cut flowers, so it is good to know that the more you pick, the more they flower. There is also a perennial variety known as The Everlasting Sweet Pea.
Strong winter scent Winter flowering Honeysuckle
One of the most sweetly scented winter flowering plants is the Honeysuckle Lonicera fragrantissim. It flowers from mid-December to March and is easy to grow. Although to be fair, as a shrub it is fairly nondescript, it really comes into its own with the winter scent,
Ideal for cooler gardens Tropaeolum speciosum The Flame Flower
An unusual looking climbing plant with scarlet flowers in late summer and autumn,Tropaeolum speciosum is ideal to grow in cooler, more northerly gardens as we also know it as the Scottish flame flower. I have seen it grown to great effect through an evergreen shrub or hedge, especially Yew.
For annuals you can make a temporary support, using pruning off cuts, which make an attractive natural arrangement, as spotted here at one of the RHS gardens.
last updated 08.12.2022