Thread: Russian vine
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Old 04-04-2007, 05:52 PM
echinosum echinosum is offline
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First recorded activity by GardenBanter: Feb 2006
Location: Chalfont St Giles
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Renee View Post
Could anyone tell me where I could get hold of a Russian vine? I'm told they cover fences superbly.
It would be irresponsible of me to tell you unless you can answer yes to all of these questions:

Do you have a very, very, very big fence? Do you require it to be utterly smothered, probably along with any other plant or building in the same vague area, up to the size of, say, an aircraft hanger? Are you happy doing a lot of cutting back from time to time and removing very large volumes of off-cuts? Are you happy planting something called "Fallopia baldschuanica" in Latin, and colloquially known as "mile-a-minute"? Are you happy that the BBC advice on it is "It grows far too big, too fast and too ugly even for a large garden"?

But I expect you will discover it is, sadly, for sale almost anywhere they sell plants, along with other horrors like Leyland cypress.

You can find lots of other nice and more controllable plants to cover normal size fences like jasmines and honeysuckles and clematis and chocolate vine, and some of them are evergreen.