Tangled Web We Weave

I spent some time this week creating an invisible trellis for my purple hyacinth bean plants. It's a lovely ornamental climbing bean with small lavender flowers in the summer and long dark showy pods from late summer until first frost. A Master Gardener friend got me started on it when she showed me her gazebo covered in it last summer and gave me some seeds.

I started them inside, and as they got growing, they wanted to twine around anything and everything. We're technically a few days shy of the last official frost date for zone 7 (April 15th), but since we just hit the 30's last night and the temps are climbing again, surely we won't have another cold snap! That's my 'hurry up, I want to plant it!' gardening logic, anyhow. So I prepared the beds and rigged up a tidy lattice of high strength fishing line just off the front porch. The vines will block the hot western sun in summer and form a visual screen from the busy road a quarter mile from us. It's just an annual, but it will serve as a nice place holder for the evergreen Clematis Armandii I would like to plant there this fall.