Dutchman's Pipe

If you have something you would rather not look at, this is the vine for it. Dutchman's pipe features heart-shaped leaves 6 to 12 inches across that overlap into a solid green wall, dense enough to block a view and cool enough to sit under. It climbs 10 to 30 feet depending on what you give it to climb, spreads 4 to 10 feet, and comes back reliably through Zone 4 winters. Give it a season or two to root in and it takes off, growing fast enough after that you will be cutting it back rather than waiting on it.

It is also the host plant for the Pipevine Swallowtail. That butterfly's caterpillars eat pipevine and nothing else, so this is one of the few screening vines that is genuinely doing something rather than just filling a trellis. Gardeners in the Southeast and mid-Atlantic have the best odds of seeing them, and anywhere you plant it, you have added the one thing that species requires.

The flowers are the plant's private joke. Curved yellow green pipes with a flared maroon throat, tucked out of sight under the leaves in late spring. Nobody buys this vine for the bloom display, and everyone who grows it ends up parting the foliage to find them.

Siting and support

Part sun suits it best, roughly 4 to 6 hours of direct sun with some afternoon relief. Give it rich, consistently moist, well drained soil, and space plants 4 to 6 feet apart if you want unbroken coverage across a fence or pergola run.

Give it something substantial to climb. A mature pipevine is heavy and twines with real force, so it wants a porch column, pergola post, arbor, or heavy gauge wire. Thin lattice will not hold it. Set the support before you plant, because retrofitting one under an established vine is miserable work.

Deer leave it alone. The foliage carries a bitter compound that the swallowtail caterpillars store in their own bodies to make themselves taste terrible to birds, the same chemistry that keeps browsers off the vine.