Smilax

Are there any other smilax enthusiasts out there? In the old days this genus was included in the Liliaceae, but now it gets a family of its own, the Smilacaceae. Some are reviled as obnoxious weeds, some are hugely ornamental. The ones I grow range in size from little S. pumila and S. bifolia to mighty S. smallii which covers the side of our house and part of the roof, tangled with noisette roses and Campsis 'Mme Galen'. The smilax is the boss of that group.


Most species have black fruits, but S. walteri has very ornamental red fruits. It’s a treat to visit the black water swamps of the southeastern states during the winter and find broad tangles of this species spangled with the bright red fruits – but at first you’ll probably be tricked by the more numerous red-fruited deciduous hollies.

Some of the southern species flower regularly here and set fruit, but the resulting seed do not survive the winters here.

I’ve always liked these plants and had a few in the garden. It’s hard to find anyone else with much of an interest in them. Professional horticulturists in general neglect them, although in the early twentieth century no less a luminary than Beatrix Farrand used them on some of the walls of Princeton University (or so I recall reading).

Most I grow in the open, but little S. pumila gets cold frame treatment. Its mottled leaves (in the style of some Asarum) make it worth the space. It will survive indefinitely in the open here in a sheltered spot, but the fruit will not ripen in the open air and bad winters can damage the plant severely.

I’m training S. laurifolia onto the deck: so far, it has climbed to the 10’ level. Mature plants in the wild are awesome, like something out of some lost world fantasy. The canes sometimes go thirty or more feet straight up into trees – I assume they have grown up with the trees. I grew my plants from seed collected more than fifteen years ago after a storm had brought down some smilax festooned trees – otherwise I never would have been able to reach the seed. This species has great ornamental value but is almost completely neglected. The foliage suggests that of Clematis armandii or Holboellia – it’s a rare garden visitor who has any idea what it is. There is nothing else like it in our indigenous flora.

The flowers of S. smallii are sweetly fragrant. Other species such as S. herbacea smell of carrion. When I was a kid I used to think of S. herbacea as “hardy philodendron” – it resembles that house plant (the heart-leaf climber) a lot.

Are they geophytes? Some grow from clusters of banana like tuberous growths.

Sarsaparilla was (still is?) made from some tropical species.

In the photo above is little Smilax bifolia, which is small enough to be used, potted, as table decoration.

Smilax laurifolia

Some of the plants I'm most proud of are apt to engender perplexity in some garden visitors. The several members of the genus Smilax which grow here are good examples. These are tough plants, not easily removed when they get in the way of horticultural or agricultural activity. Some are herbaceous, but most are thorny, more or less evergreen vining plants. Even in those forms in which the foliage does not survive the winter, the stems remain green and conspicuous.

Several of them form nearly impenetrable thickets, and several are prodigious vines. Another of these robustly vining sorts, Smilax smallii, was discussed in an earlier entry: http://mcwort.blogspot.com/2008/02/smilax-smallii.html

The subject of this entry is the biggest of the North American species, Smilax laurifolia. It goes right to the tops of trees and forms thick, trunk-like stems, bare of foliage sometimes for the first thirty or so feet. It's a stunning plant, nothing like anything else in our native flora. Surely there must be at least one Victorian writer who deemed it antediluvian. To me it looks like something from a tropical rain forest.

Back in the early '90s Wayne and I were birding in far southern eastern Virginia shortly after a big storm had gone through the area. That storm was my friend: I had been trying to collect seed of this species for years, but the seed was always forty feet up in the trees. That day I was in luck: we found a big tree which had come down in the storm, and the tree was wreathed in Smilax laurifolia. And the Smilax was full of ripe fruit.

All the Smilax I've grown from seed have been very slow, and this species is no exception. Years after the seed was sown all I had to show for my efforts were tiny plants to be measured in inches. But they got better yearly, and three years ago they finally began to put on size. Now they put on about four feet yearly. The largest is being trained into position with the idea of letting it cover part of the deck railing.

This largest plant provided a surprise this year: it bloomed for the first time. It has yet to experience a really biting winter here. But in nature it ranges at least as far north as coastal New Jersey, so I'm expecting to do well in the long run.

Smilax smallii

Last week I attended a talk in which Lindie Wilson, who came to own Elizabeth Lawrence’s last home in Charlotte, North Carolina, told us about her efforts to preserve the garden. Those efforts were successful, so much so that the property has been acquired by a trust and will be preserved into the future. For more about this, see:
http://www.elizabethlawrence.org/

There are a number of Elizabeth Lawrence plants in my garden – plants which I first learned about from reading her works or which for other reasons I associate with her memory. One of my favorites is a two-for: a plant I associate with the late Henry Mitchell and with Elizabeth Lawrence. It’s the Jackson vine, Smilax smallii. I regard it and Smilax laurifolia as the most magnificent vines native to North America, yet they are hardly known outside of their natural range in the south-east and south-central states.

Although I had known about Smilax smallii for years, I did not know of a source for it until I happened to mention it in 1987 in the presence of a stranger who not only knew the plant but told me where to obtain it: Woodlanders, of course. Soon several feet of slight vine attached to what looked like bananas arrived in the mail. These were given a prime spot in the garden: on the south side of the house against the chimney. It was a good choice. Now, nearly twenty years later, the vine has run up to the roof of the house and hangs out in graceful evergreen swags of handsome foliage. Each year new sprouts rise from the ground and go right up to the roof and more.

Smilax smallii is thornless (or nearly so) and its flowers are fragrant. It has never matured seed in my garden; presumably the developing seed is killed during the winter. This plant carries its foliage in the most graceful way. Each spray of foliage forms a triangle a yard or two on each side; the leaves are disposed neatly and regularly throughout the area of this triangle. Cut branches retain their form and gloss well; I’ve read that in the old days railroad carloads of cut stems were sent north for the holidays.

Take a careful look at that famous picture of Elizabeth Lawrence welcoming us into her garden. On the arch over the gate grows a robust Clematis armandii. If you look carefully at the lower right side of the gate, you can make out a young Smilax smallii getting started. In fact, if you look very carefully you might be able to make out its stems pushing up into the clematis.

After the talk I asked Lindie Wilson about the smilax: she told me that the smilax was gone from the gate when she arrived – but that it now covers the front of the house. More of us should follow Elizabeth Lawrence's example in this.

Smilax laurifolia also grows in my garden. Raised from seed and now about fifteen years old, the largest of several plants is only about seven feet high. It has the potential to go to the tops of trees. In the wild, mature plants of this species are awesome.