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Vine

Plant with a growth habit of trailing or scandent stems or runners

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பாகற்காய் செடி, சின்ன சேலம், தமிழகம், இந்திய ஒன்றியம்.
Thamizhpparithi Maari · CC BY-SA 3.0

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In parts of the world, including the British Isles, the term "vine" usually applies exclusively to grapevines, while the term "climber" is used for all climbing plants.

Growth forms

Certain plants always grow as vines, while a few grow as vines only part of the time. For instance, poison ivy and bittersweet can grow as low shrubs when support is not available, but will become vines when support is available.

A vine displays a growth form based on very long stems. This has two purposes. A vine may use rock exposures, other plants, or other supports for growth rather than investing energy in a lot of supportive tissue, enabling the plant to reach sunlight with a minimum investment of energy. This has been a highly successful growth form for plants such as kudzu and Japanese honeysuckle, both of which are invasive exotics in parts of North America. There are some tropical vines that develop skototropism, and grow away from the light, a type of negative phototropism. Growth away from light allows the vine to reach a tree trunk, which it can then climb to brighter regions.

The vine growth form may also enable plants to colonize large areas quickly, even without climbing high. This is the case with periwinkle and ground ivy. It is also an adaptation to life in areas where small patches of fertile soil are adjacent to exposed areas with more sunlight but little or no soil. A vine can root in the soil but have most of its leaves in the brighter, exposed area, getting the best of both environments.

The evolution of a climbing habit has been implicated as a key innovation associated with the evolutionary success and diversification of a number of taxonomic groups of plants. It has evolved independently in several plant families, using many different climbing methods, such as:

  • twining the stem around a support (e.g., morning glories, Ipomoea species)
  • by way of adventitious, clinging roots (e.g., ivy, Hedera species)
  • with twining petioles (e.g., Clematis species)
  • using tendrils, which can be specialized shoots (Vitaceae), leaves (Bignoniaceae), or even inflorescences (Passiflora)
  • using tendrils which also produce adhesive pads at the end that attach themselves quite strongly to the support (Parthenocissus)
  • using thorns (e.g. climbing rose) or other hooked structures, such as hooked branches (e.g. Artabotrys hexapetalus)

The climbing fetterbush (Pieris phillyreifolia) is a woody shrub-vine which climbs without clinging roots, tendrils, or thorns. It directs its stem into a crevice in the bark of fibrous barked trees (such as bald cypress) where the stem adopts a flattened profile and grows up the tree underneath the host tree's outer bark. The fetterbush then sends out branches that emerge near the top of the tree.

Most vines are flowering plants. These may be divided into woody vines or lianas, such as akebia wisteria, kiwifruit, and common ivy, and herbaceous (nonwoody) vines, such as morning glory.

One odd group of vining plants is the fern genus Lygodium, called climbing ferns. The stem does not climb, but rather the fronds (leaves) do. The fronds unroll from the tip, and theoretically never stop growing; they can form thickets as they unroll over other plants, rockfaces, and fences.

Twining vines

A twining vine, also known as a bine, climbs by its shoots growing in a helix, in contrast to vines that climb using tendrils or suckers. Many bines have rough stems or downward-pointing bristles to aid their grip. Hops (used in flavoring beer) are a commercially important example of a bine. Compare "woodbines", a common name that is used to refer to both bines such as Lonicera periclymenum, a honeysuckle, and some Parthenocissus species, which have tendrils.

The direction of rotation of the shoot tip during climbing is autonomous and does not (as is sometimes imagined folk-scientifically) result from the shoot's following the sun around the sky – the direction of twist does not therefore depend upon which north-south hemisphere the plant is growing on. This is shown by the fact that some bines always twine clockwise, including runner bean (Phaseolus coccineus) and bindweed (Convolvulus species), while others twine anticlockwise, including black bryony (Dioscorea communis) and climbing honeysuckles (Lonicera species).

The contrasting rotations of bindweed and honeysuckle was the theme of the satirical song "Misalliance", written and sung by Michael Flanders and Donald Swann. Incidentally, the lyrics confuse the direction of twining, describing honeysuckle as right-handed and bindweed as left-handed.

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GenusTaxonomic rank above species and below familyFamily (taxonomy)Taxonomic rank between genus and orderEndemismState of species being unique to a locationCladeGroup of a common ancestor and all of their descendantsGenomeAll genetic material of an organismOrder (taxonomy)Taxonomic rank between class and family
Source and licence. Adapted from the Wikipedia article “Vine” (this version, 2026-09-18) by its contributors, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Lablypedia has left out its tables, references and most pictures, and linked it to other Lablypedia articles.