Saturday, February 16, 2008

My daughter wanted to know what "those things" were on my Passion Vin

Last night as I was checking my Passion for mites (I am positive now that we do have mites), my daughter asked me what is this on your Passion vine? She pointed at the little slinky-ish, coiled up spirals.

(photo courtesy of Wikipedia)

I knew what they were, I remember learning this stuff in school, but I could not for the life of me remember what they were called. Because it was late I never bothered googling for some answers. Below is picture a of some relatively new tendrils that have not coiled up yet.

This morning I remembered the name......tendrils. A tendril is a leaf, stem or petiole that has a threadlike shape. They use the tendrils for support and for climbing. When I run my finger down the length of the newer tendrils, I can actually feel the small hook at the end of the tendril.


They cling to anything it can reach, which is driving me crazy, because they cling to other plants, and trying to loosen their grip can cause damage (to the other plants) as well. In the pic below you can see one of tendrils has even wrapped around it's own leaf.

2 comments:

Aiyana said...

Hi Tracy,
You may want to know that the comment left by ivan contains a spyware/virus in the link in the comment. If anyone clicks on it, it will download spyware on one's computer. When you see unkown commenters that have attached a link, that's usually what it is, or else it's going to a site that sells plants or accessories--set up so that the person who attached the link gets paid ad revenue.

Tracy said...

Funny you should mention this, I did click on it in my email notification, but realizing it was something bad, I shut the internet off right away. Hope fully I am okay. After this happened I also changed the settings so that word verification was on.

Many thanks