Campsis radicans
Virginia jasmine, trumpet vine, Virginia trumpet creeper, fire vine: despite its name, it is not a jasmine at all. This climbing plant from North America attaches itself to walls with true aerial rootlets and covers façades with bright orange trumpets in midsummer, at a time when few other climbers are still flowering.
Characteristics:
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Spectacular flowering: large bright orange trumpets grouped in clusters, from July to September.
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Self-supporting climber: it attaches itself with aerial roots, without any support or training.
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Highly adaptable: it withstands heat, drought, salty winds, and air pollution.
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Hardy: down to around -10 °C in good conditions, and lower once well established.
Precautions:
- Its sap and foliage may cause itching and redness in sensitive people: wear gloves when pruning it and wash your hands afterward.
- Its vigorous growth requires monitoring: it produces suckers at a distance, and its aerial roots can work their way into fragile render or beneath roof tiles. Reserve it for sound walls and prune it every year.
Sowing advice:
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Exposure: full sun, preferably against a warm wall — this is essential for abundant flowering.
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Soil: ordinary, well-drained soil, even poor or stony. Important: do not fertilize. In soil that is too rich, it produces masses of foliage and few flowers, a very common tendency in this plant.
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Method: sow in spring, in pots, after soaking the seeds for 24 hours in lukewarm water. A few weeks of cold stratification improves the evenness of germination. See how to sow your seeds.
Planting advice:
- Plant it at the foot of a wall, arbour, or sturdy trellis: when mature, it becomes heavy. Keep it away from gutters and roofs.
- It can also be trained as ground cover, or patiently shaped into a small tree on a stake.
Care advice:
- Prune it hard at the end of winter, leaving 2 or 3 buds on the main branches: it flowers on new wood, and this severe pruning produces the best flowering.
- Be patient: a young plant often takes 3 to 5 years to flower for the first time.
- Remove suckers every year to keep it in place.
Beneficial combinations:
- On a large wall, it can share the space with Virginia creeper, whose autumn red foliage takes over when its flowering ends.
Benefits for biodiversity:
- Its nectar-filled trumpets are designed for hummingbirds in its native America. In our climates, large bumblebees and hawk moths literally plunge into them.
- Its late flowering, in the height of summer, fills a lean period for pollinators.
- Its dense foliage on a wall provides shelter for birds and beneficial insects.
Uses:
- Covering walls, façades, arbours, pergolas, and trellises. One of the few climbers to flower so generously in midsummer.
Harvesting your own seeds:
After flowering, it produces long, slender pods. Harvest them dry from the plant, before they open: they release winged, papery seeds that are carried away by the wind. See how to store your seeds.
Commitment to Quality: at SemiSauvage - Permaculture, we grow and select our seeds with respect for living things as our guiding principle. Based near the Volcanoes of Auvergne, we choose reproducible, non-hybrid varieties, tested for their germination rate, carefully sorted and packaged, with no chemical treatment. Our belief: to give gardeners back the ability to sow, year after year, seeds that truly belong to them.
Set a bare wall ablaze with orange trumpets in the heart of summer.
