Garden Trees, Shrubs & Vines
Kailen Skewis
Vining plants such as pothos, English ivy, and heartleaf philodendron aren’t too difficult to style in your home. Often, lifting them in a hanging basket or letting their stems cascade off a high shelf is all you need to make your space lush and green. However, if you’ve ever seen a healthy vining plant deliberately creeping upward, you know that training the growth of a certain species can completely transform its look.
Unfortunately, there are not many attractive or easy ways to train your plants upward without using stakes, clips, trellises, or other items that limit your plant’s potential. Plant rods look too industrial or bulky, and some clips force you to train the plant onto a flat surface. Luckily, TikTok user @foxcraftcustom tried her creative hand at training her pothos plant and found a solution to this problem — attaching the stems to 12-gauge jewelry wire and bending them into a whimsical shape before securing the flexible metal into the soil. The final product is undoubtedly gorgeous and gives new life to the vining plant.
How you can recreate the hack
@foxcraftcustom
Wait this is so cool
♬ Ladyfingers – Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass
To make your houseplants grow up toward the sky, you’ll need Benecreat 12-Gauge Jewelry Craft Wire, orchid clips, and a potted vining plant. Your jewelry wire can be a thin 12-gauge wire, but choosing a thicker nine or 10-gauge option may better support the weight of longer stems. Additionally, if you have jewelry-making tools like pliers or cutters, they might come in handy — though they aren’t necessary.
The first step requires shaping your wires and making them stable in the soil. Start by measuring your vines against the wire and cut it just a few inches longer than the length of the vine. Using your finger — or a skinny cylindrical object such as a pencil — wrap one end of the wire around several times to create a corkscrew. Screw that end into the soil. Once it’s stable, start wrapping a vine around your wire and secure it at the top with a small orchid clip. Repeat these steps for all of your longest vines. In the end, the vines should appear to be floating upward from their pot.
Options for other vining plants
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Though pothos and heartleaf philodendron plants are the most popular species of vining houseplants, there are others that could benefit from a dramatic lift. Classic hanging plants such as the string of pearls, string of dolphins, string of turtles, and string of hearts plants boast long stems that can be easily supported by a single wire. There are other rarer “string of” plants with interestingly shaped leaves you may consider as well, but just be careful of their delicate roots and leaves as you shape them.
Vining Hoya species — the Hindu rope plant and wax plant in particular — might be good candidates for this hack. However, their stems are much heavier and more dense than our previously mentioned cultivars. To support their vines, you’ll likely need a thicker wire. Alternatively, you can also twist two strands of a 10- or 11-gauge wire together so it can support more weight. In the soil, a corkscrew shape won’t do you much good with these sorts of plants either. To stabilize it in the pot, you can stab it through the bottom of the container and twist or add a flat piece of plastic beneath the soil for the wire to grab onto.
