Wine grape

A fast-growing, tendril-climbing native vine of the eastern United States, named "maypop" for the fleshy egg-shaped fruits that pop underfoot. Its intricate 2.5-inch fringed flowers - white-to-lavender petals beneath a pinkish-purple filament crown and a raised central androgynophore - are precisely engineered for large carpenter bees. Woody in warm-winter climates and herbaceous (dying to the ground) where winters are cold, it climbs to 6 to 8 feet on a trellis and produces edible yellowish maypops in fall.

A tall, tuber-forming perennial sunflower native to eastern North America - also called Jerusalem artichoke or sunroot - grown both for its 2-4 inch bright-yellow late-summer sunflowers and its knobby edible underground tubers. Rough-hairy stems rise 6 to 10 feet bearing ovate, serrate leaves on winged petioles. It spreads aggressively by rhizome and self-seeding to form colonies; Missouri Botanical Garden flatly calls it "weedy and invasive" and difficult to remove once planted.

A giant herbaceous perennial from Southeast Asia and the principal wild ancestor of most cultivated dessert bananas. What looks like a trunk is a 'pseudostem' - tightly rolled leaf sheaths - topped by a fountain of huge, paddle-shaped leaves that can run 6 to 10 feet long, giving an instant tropical effect. In frost-free climates (USDA zones 10a-11b) an established clump produces a drooping flower spike and a hanging bunch of edible fruit, then that pseudostem dies and is replaced by a sucker from the base. It is frost-tender: everywhere colder it is grown as a bold container or greenhouse foliage plant that is overwintered indoors and rarely, if ever, fruits.

A herbaceous, tuberous perennial vine of eastern North America that twines 8 to 16 feet up surrounding vegetation through moist thickets, bottomlands, marsh and streambank edges. From mid-summer into fall it carries fragrant, maroon-to-reddish-brown pea-like flowers in compact racemes from the leaf axils, followed by edible seeds; the underground tubers are an edible, protein-rich staple long gathered as Indian potato. A native legume and a documented larval host for the Silver-spotted Skipper, it spreads vigorously by seed and tubers.

A vigorous, fast-growing woody vine from China grown commercially worldwide for its fuzzy brown, edible fruits. It climbs 15 to 30 feet and can fill a 200 sq. ft. trellis in time, carrying large rounded leaves and slightly fragrant cream flowers that open on year-old wood in late spring. It is dioecious: a male pollinizer must be grown alongside female plants for fruit to set.

A vigorous, evergreen, tendril-climbing vine from the subtropics of southern Brazil, Paraguay, and northern Argentina, grown both for its strikingly intricate purple-and-white flowers and for its edible passion fruit. The flower is a small work of engineering: a ring of white-and-purple petals beneath a fringed corona of wavy purple-banded filaments, with the five anthers and three stigmas held on a raised central column at exactly the height a large carpenter bee brushes as it forages. Where winters are frost-free (USDA zones 9b-11b) it is a fast, hard-climbing perennial that can blanket a sturdy trellis or fence in a single season and produces round, leathery purple or yellow fruits whose aromatic, seedy pulp is the fragrant passion fruit of juices and desserts. Two honest cautions matter: it is a frost-tender plant grown as an annual or under glass where colder, and the unripe fruit and the foliage contain cyanogenic compounds and are mildly toxic, so only fully ripe fruit should be eaten.