Creeping Fig Ficus pumila I love the delicate vine as is grows, hugging the fence. It was there when we moved in. It covers the fence across the entire back of the yard. The leaves are only an inch or so.
But make no mistake. This plant is not delicate at all. It looks like an entirely different plant when it grows away from the fence. The leaves get much larger (up to 2"-4" long) as do the branches. The Sunset book says there is almost no limit to the size of this vine and the area it will cover. It's a very common landscaping plant, but I suspect most gardeners hate it. Instead, it is almost always cut back with a hedge trimmer. This creates something that looks like a wall-hugging hedge.
If you want to keep it delicate and clinging to the fence you have to clip anything that grows away from the fence. I think of it as a labor of love. This does not make it a low-maintenance plant, but it is manageable. If you cut it back severely it will only need this every 6-12 months.
If you let it grow it just might take over the world! I discovered that ours had grown over the fence and up the neighbor's tree. I don't know if you can see it climbing up its cousin, a Ficus tree Ficus benjamina.
It closely resembles the what I was calling an ivy that was growing [over-grown is closer to the truth] on our house when we bought it. Our house is a limestone verneer [called "rock" in Texas] and that stuff will penetrate and crack mortor.
ReplyDeleteI attached a bushwacker blade to my weedeater and cut it down as a single sheet. The vines had separated the rock in a couple of places on our garage on its street-facing side. It also cracked a planter on that same side where the vine found tiny opennings and made them larger as it grew. The "mother" vines grew from the ground up and were about the size of an adult thumb. GOOD LUCK!!!
Yep. This stuff can be pretty aggressive. We have English Ivy on another side of our fence. It's topped by what I thought was a tree from our neighbor's side. It turns out they thought there was a tree on our side. It's just the Ivy and its "mother" vines are about as thick as my wrist. I'll probably need a chain saw to cut that back!
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