Can Sweet Peas Grow Up a Tree for Support?

The sweet pea is a popular annual flower that is grown in many places throughout the world, and is especially popular in both England and the United States. This flower comes in a wide range of colours, including pink, blue, lavender, white and red. Sweet peas are popular both for their bright blossoms and their appealing fragrance. There are many different varieties of this flower, offering the sweet pea fan plenty of choices when choosing which one to grow. Vines climb in several different ways. How a vine climbs affects what kind of support the vine requires as it grows.

Some vines have stems that twine around everything, wrapping the entire vine around a slender support as the vine gets taller. This type of vine must have a very slender support, such as a pole or wire to climb up. The best way to grow twining vines up a surface such as a fence is to run wire up and down the fence. The vines will grab the wires, allowing them to cover the fence. Twining vines cannot wrap themselves around large objects, such as trees.

Rambling vines, sometimes also called scrambling, don't have a way of clinging to any surface. These vines must be tied to a support as they grow or they will end up growing in big jumbled mounds. The vines tend to grow upwards, so plastic or string ties can be used to secure them to vertical objects, allowing them to grow up and over fences and walls.

Clinging vines have sticky or invasive pads that adhere to anything they encounter. These vines can grow on almost anything, including vertical walls, fences and trees. This type of vine may cause damage to such surfaces as brick or stucco walls, as the pads will invade any crack or space they encounter, eventually breaking off bits of the wall's surface. Once started, clinging vines are almost impossible to get rid of and will leave marks behind if the vines are removed.

Coiling vines have small, twisted tendrils that are extensions of the vines. These wrap themselves around available objects, allowing the plants to grow upward. Vines that use coiling tendrils for support cannot use very large objects, such as trees or posts, for support because the tendrils wrap very tightly and have small coils to begin with.

Sweet peas belong to the group of vines that grow by sending out coiled tendrils. Because of this, sweet peas cannot grow up anything very large and are not able to use a tree for support. If they are grown without anything suitable to cling to, they will grow as a tangled mound of flower-filled vines.