Meet this garden menace with a pretty name but ugly personality
Ampelopsis brevipedunculata. OK, try that one more time — slowly — Ampe-lopsis brevi-pedunc-ulata. Just being able to roll that baby off the tongue qualifies one as a certified plant geek. Add in the common name, porcelain vine, and you’d think this is a can’t-miss plant. With a legendary tongue twister for a Latin name and a poetic and evocative common name, the plant must be a winner. Oh, a rose by any other name ...
OK, let’s leave the crazy name thing to one side and concentrate on the plant’s features. This woody vine will grow just about anywhere — sun, shade, dry, damp. It handles drought, floods, compaction and poor soil nutrition. It thrives in acid as well as alkaline soil. Still not enough for ya?
The leaves, while they may not have anything to boast about in the way of fall color, are clean, rarely chewed on by insects. They’re deer proof and keep a lustrous, dark green color all through the growing season. The deeply dissected, five-fingered leaves offer a delightfully lacy pattern that is instantly recognizable once you’ve seen it for the first time. Occasionally, seedlings will emerge with a swirl of white variegation to add to the allure.
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But in the eye candy department, what sets this one apart is the fruit. Starting in mid to late summer, rather nondescript little green flowers bear the most amazing porcelain-like purple/blue fruit. They are glossy, slightly speckled (possibly leading to its other common name, Japanese pepper vine) and look like they were just gently lifted from a kiln. There is nothing in the temperate plant world that comes close.
Now I could stop right there and you’d think, “where can I get a dozen or two to plant around the garden?” but as Paul Harvey said so many times, “now for the rest of the story!”
The problem with porcelain vine is exactly that it is such an absolute survivor. It will literally grow anywhere and is almost unstoppable. Concrete sidewalk cracks? No problem. Parking lots, garbage dumps, under decks, behind air conditioner compressors? That’s just fine. Quite simply, porcelain vine is the poster child for the world of exotic invasive plants.
This is one of those awful stories of a pretty plant, introduced as an ornamental that quickly got out of hand. Native to Japan and northern China, it has become a tremendous pest in much of the eastern U.S. where birds eat those bright, shiny fruits and efficiently and effectively spread them far and wide. Once germinated in a new home, plants grow like wildfire to cover the ground, race over shrub layers, climb up and overtop trees and essentially shade out everything in their path. This is one of those plants worth getting to know — if only to know the enemy!
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Control of porcelain vine presents a bit of a challenge, to say the least. You can pull it and pull it but it just keeps sprouting. It grows so fast that you can spray it with weed killer all summer long and it just keeps coming at you. Herbicides such as glyphosate (Roundup®) kill off the leaves but the vine springs right back. Of course, the trick is to kill the roots, not just the leaves.
These days, most land managers (including the National Park Service) recommend control by a combination of autumn pulling/cutting and treating the base of the plant with glyphosate or a related herbicide. The trick is to get the herbicide to the roots of the plant where it can do its deadly deed. During the fall, plants are naturally sending resources back down to the roots so dabbing some herbicide directly on the cut base of a vine means that the compound will be translocated down to where it can make a difference. The other advantage of treating cut stem ends is that you use very little herbicide.
Of course, if you prefer, you can just try picking a peck of pickled pepper vine and see if that works!
Yew Dell Botanical Gardens is at 6220 Old La Grange Road, Crestwood, Kentucky.