What is your favourite colour? Are you a yellow belly, a pink lady or perhaps a blue, blue meanie? Well, if your favourite colour happens to be red, orange or yellow, autumn is the season for you. 

What autumn lacks in flower colour is more than made up for with the fiery leaf shades that many trees and shrubs produce at this time of year. Personally, I hold autumn as my favourite season due primarily to this glorious leaf colouration.
 
But rather than look to trees and shrubs to provide me with my first fix of autumn colour, I instead look to a climbing plant. That climber is the Virginia creeper, also known as the five-leaved ivy or to use its correct Latin name, Parthenocissus quinquefolia. A green leaved plant, it spends the spring and summer hovering in the background of its flashier companion plants, to suddenly burst onto the stage each autumn.

I should be used to it at this stage, but I am annually amazed by the quick colour transformation of the Virginia creeper. Its leaf colouration alters from Plain Jane green into warm hues of ochre, auburn, deep red and burgundy before leaf fall. All this happens because of cooling outdoor temperatures working on the sugars within the leaf to expose pigments, which up until now remained hidden.

Virginia creeper can be used as a self-clinging climbing plant on walls that are both plastered or unplastered. Unlike other climbing plants, such as clematis or honeysuckle, Virginia creeper supports itself by means of small, forked clinging tendrils. At the ends of these tendrils are strongly adhesive discs, which adhere by sticking to the wall rather than penetrating into it. Because of this sticking or cementing rather than rooting, it causes no damage to the masonry of walls.

Left unpruned in the wild, Parthenocissus quinquefolia has been known to reach heights of 20 to 30 metres with new growth of six metres long produced in a year. Thankfully, if planted at the base of an Irish wall, it will usually grow to approximately ten metres in height and five metres in spread (smaller still with pruning).
 
A vine that grows best if planted in semi-shade on an east or west-facing wall, it requires a well-drained but moisture retentive fertile soil. The moisture retentive soil and semi-shade location help to keep its roots moist when planted at the bone-dry bases of walls.
If you are a lover of fiery colours, you can do a lot worse than include Parthenocissus quinquefolia in your overall garden scheme. So until next week happy gardening and remember that a weed is just a plant in the wrong place.

As well as his horticultural writing, James Kilkelly provides a garden and landscape design service based in County Galway. Contact him through his website www.gardenplansireland.com or alternatively by phone at 087-2067846. For help with all your gardening questions you can visit www.irishgardeners.com, the Irish gardening resource.

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