Late to the thread, but at my old house, Madame Isaac Pereire from an Heirloom band grew to about a foot the first year, about 2 feet the second year and over 5 feet tall and wide the third year, very bushy and not the long graceful canes I was hoping for. She was planted on a west wall, with about 6 hours of sun a day. A perfect example of 'First they sleep, then they creep, then they leap.' I took her out because she took over the space, and the flowers came out just when the summer heat arrived, and I only had crispy little balls of magenta unless I cut them in the morning. I should have just figured a way to give her some afternoon shade. Here is a link that might be useful: Garden at the Modern House

Garden centres in the UK are already looking like plant supermarkets unfortunately. One has to go to specialist nurseries to find anything different, and they are disappearing too. The garden centre a mile away from my house is the largest in the UK, and cost seven million pounds to build. Same lines get sold every season, never anything different. It is a plant supermarket. My point about the variation in plants is this: you may well carry 32 varieties, but if they all end up being TC plants, there will be very little, or no variation within those individual groups. If H.x hybridus does end up being mass produced through tissue culture, those doing it will soon learn what sells and what doesn't. The range available will shrink. I like to have a choice as a consumer. What one person overlooks, I might want. I don't want a narrow selection of plants with flowers that are, for example, white, dark violet, yellow, and pink. And then the same again with spots. I want to be able to search through dozens of plants, looking for something that I think is special. I'm not anti plant patenting. I just don't think it is helpful to anybody in particular. I suppose it gives whoever developed or discovered a plant which they believe to be especially gardenworthy, a false peace of mind. Take 'Pink Marble' as an example - If I have 1000 lividus here, there is a very good chance that a number of those plants would look just like 'Pink Marble'. Obviously that patent doesn't stop me selling those plants. All it does is stop me using that particular name. On a small scale, it doesn't even stop me doing that. Who is there to police it? Calling a plant Helleborus 'Pink Marble' is just bad nomenclature. At the very least it should be H. lividus 'Pink Marble', and I don't like that, either. There is a very good reason why names shouldn't be given to selections of the species, and that is because they, in most cases (probably all), haven't been propagated by divison, and if that is the case, they are no more than 'strains'. Potter's Wheel is a classic point. The name was given to a single plant originally. But yet we still have thousands of plants in the trade all around the globe carrying the name. Is this right? None of them are divisions of the original. They probably don't even descend from the original. I can go into most colonies of niger I know of in Croatia and Slovenia, and find a few plants which fit the description of 'Potter's Wheel'. Does this mean that these plants are Potter's Wheel? Not to me it doesn't. They are simply niger with large flowers. And yet if I collected those plants and stuck a 'Potter's Wheel' label in them, nobody would know any different. I don't know about in the US, but here in the UK, nearly all niger with a 'Potter's Wheel' label do not have flowers which are any larger than can be found regularly in the wild. So to answer you question, in the case of Potter's Wheel, no I don't recognise the distinction between that and the straight species because there isn't really any. As for Wester Flisk, Gold Bullion and Silver Lace, yes, I do appreciate that using these names does allow us to be able to have conversations about the plants and all know what the other person is talking about, but the names (leaving aside Wester Flisk) were not given for that reason. They were given to appeal to the buyer. It looks like we are destined to disagree on most points, but it's an interesting debate nonetheless.

Nopeeking, I haven't grown it here, but I grew it in Texas about 80 miles south of where I now live in southern OK. I grew it about 20 years ago in a very hot, dry summer and it was only okay as far as performance goes. I thought it would thrive in the heat, but it didn't, although it did well until we got really hot. Probably it would have been happier in a wetter year, or with more irrigation than I gave it, or in better soil (I had black gumbo clay). The flowers were really pretty but their color seemed to wash out in strong sunlight and heat. That's not unusual in extreme heat though. I'm surprised you had to go to E-bay to find seeds. I still see it on some seed racks here, especially early in spring. I love vines and have them everywhere, but aggressive perennial vines do require aggressive maintenance to keep them under control. In the 4 fenced veggie garden plots I grow mostly annual vines (and a handful of perennial ones) on all my 8' tall anti-deer fences, . The annual vines get tall pretty quickly and serve as both a windbreak and a shade screen for plants inside the garden by the time the summer heat really cranks up in late June or early July. In our heat, and with our southernly summer winds, the vines are a big help. Lisa, If there is anything worse than bind weed, I cannot imagine it. I was pulling up lots of little bindweed seedlings yesterday on the north end of my garden. I like morning glories, but they can be invasive as well. I have a new favorite one---Chocolate Rose Silk. It has variegated foliage, so that when it reseeds, I can tell its seedlings from the common morning glories whose seeds infest my soil. If I pull out all the non-variegated seedlings growing at the base of that part of the fence, I end up with only the chocolate silk ones. I still find Heavenly Blue morning glories growing en masse on a garden fence completely enchanting. They stop traffic and draw more comments than anything else I've ever grown except perhaps purple hyacinth bean vine. I do hate having to yank out 400 million morning glory seedlings every year. I hope you have success with canary creeper here and let us know how it does here for you. Dawn

There are a few types of chocolate silk morning glory. Some have more white edges than others and some are more frilly than others. The leaves of some chocolate silk are variegated and others are plain. The same can be said for rose silk as well. I have 2 different chocolate silk and 2 different kinds of rose silk growing now. Will post picks of all 4 when they bloom. The color of your photo makes the flower look like rose silk not chocolate silk, but it just could be the color of your camera. Below is a pretty accurate color of my rose silk and chocolate silk from last year. Rose Silk chocolate silk