A Really Good or Really Bad Case of Mistaken Identity

by Nori Lane Bishop
(Albany Vermont USA)

Several years ago, I looked across my garden-yard and saw a lovely, white-flowered bush, just covered in blooms. I couldn't think what bush it was, couldn't remember planting anything like that over there. So I made my way over to the edge of the woods to check it out, and found the most beautiful, white-flowering vine climbing all over a young spruce tree that I had heeled in one fall for a temporary solution, and had never gone back to dig it and move it again. I

n the meantime, this really beautiful vine had grown up over it. But I wasn't sure what the vine was, and started looking it up in my various gardening books and identification manuals.

I kept thinking about the "leaves of three, let it be" saying for identifying poison ivy, and while I wasn't totally sure, it kept coming back to me that this vine fit the description.

I thought it was really too bad that poison ivy would have such lovely flowers, but I knew I had to get rid of it before it spread. I was afraid to touch it, so I put it off - for about two more years! (I know!)

Finally, one spring, I put on rubber gloves and long sleeves, and went out and hacked it off near the ground, carefully pulling the vines away from the tree and making sure nothing touched my skin.


Then, a year or two later, I went on a nature walk with a wild plant guide, and we found a much smaller version of my mystery vine, and the guide and others on the walk with us identified it as "Virgin's bower", which is wild clematis, Clematis virginiana!

I was so glad to find out what it was and that it wasn't poison ivy, but devastated to realize my mistake, and pretty chagrinned that I hadn't been able to correctly identify it myself!

This spring, I've been out to scavenge around on the ground near the young spruce tree to see if there is a surviving sprout, and I'm SO happy to report that there is actually one living vine sending out leaf buds. I'm hoping that if I transplant it very carefully, it might return to its former glory. (I'd leave it alone, but there's a patch of aegopodium heading in its direction, and I have to mow and cover it to try to control or eradicate it, and it's already too close to the Virgin's bower clematis...)

Wish me luck!