Antigonon leptopus

Few vines work as hard for as little as the coral vine. Antigonon leptopus comes out of Mexico with heart-shaped leaves, tendrils that grab any small object within reach, and long sprays of small papery flowers in a hot, slightly unreasonable pink from midsummer until frost stops the show. The flowers are borne in such quantity that the whole plant seems to fizz, and the common names have piled up accordingly: coral vine, queen's wreath, Mexican creeper, chain of love, and, in the Gulf South, confederate vine. Bees find the plant before you do. Speed is the practical argument. In the Deep South this vine freezes to the ground most winters, returns from a tuberous root once the soil warms, and covers a trellis or a good stretch of fence in a single season, which makes the plant genuinely useful for anyone who needs a screen this year rather than in five. Only in frost-free gardens does the growth stay evergreen and woody. That tuber is worth knowing about for two reasons: the swollen root is what carries the vine through a Southern winter under mulch in a protected spot, and in Mexico the tubers are dug and eaten, growing surprisingly large with age. The name is a small puzzle. Antigonon is usually read as Greek for against-angled or with-angles, apparently for the zigzag of the flowering stems, though botanists have never entirely agreed; leptopus is more straightforward, meaning slender-stalked, for the thin wiry stems that carry those heavy sprays of bloom. The family is Polygonaceae, which puts this vine in company with buckwheat, rhubarb, and the smartweeds, and once you know that, the papery flower parts stop looking like petals and start looking like the family trait they actually are. Site the vine in full sun against a fence, an arbor, or an ugly chain-link run that needs disappearing, in ordinary well-drained soil, and give something thin for the tendrils to grip; the plant climbs by twining tendrils rather than clinging, so a smooth post is useless. Water through establishment and then very little. One honest caution comes with the vigor: in genuinely frost-free, humid climates, Florida and Hawaii among them, coral vine has escaped and is listed as an invasive, spreading by seed, tuber, root sucker, and stem fragment. Where winter cuts the plant to the ground each year, that risk largely disappears, but gardeners in zone 9b and warmer should site the vine where the tubers can be dug and the seedlings pulled, and should not plant near wild land.