Create your own beautiful backyard wall garden

Many of us overlook walls and fences, but you can make them an important part of your landscape. Let them come alive by vertical gardening. Grow vines, espalier trees and shrubs, climbing roses, vining vegetables and potted plants on them.

A lot of plants benefit when allowed to climb or use walls for support. Sprawling shrubs such as cape honeysuckle, bougainvillea and climbing roses profit from growing close to a wall for support.

Or consider training plants flat against a wall. Many fruit trees grow well in espalier form such as fig, pomegranate, apple, pear and plum, as well as grapevines. Some ornamental plants that are easy to train are crape myrtle, flowering plum, Japanese privet, yew podocarpus and pyracantha. These plants need protection from afternoon sun.

Vines of all types cover walls with beautiful foliage and flowers. There are some that don't need anything to tie them to the surface. They include creeping fig, cat's-claw and ivies, but they need protection from afternoon sun.

Ivies' tiny rootlets grow from stems and attach to masonry surfaces, which can be a mess to remove. Creeping fig has a type of suction pad that glues itself to the wall and cat's-claw literally has a claw-type feature. Plan on these plants being permanent attachments to the wall.

Many vines grow by twining around or clinging onto supports with tendrils. Some of the best include lilac vine, wisteria, Carolina jasmine and star jasmine. All will grow on open fencing or chain-link. If you have a solid wall, affix wires on walls for vines to wrap around. The easiest way to affix vines to walls is to hang them from glue-on masonry hooks available at nurseries.

And remember vining vegetables such as peas, beans and cucumbers. The best varieties of peas include sugar snap, mammoth melting sugar, blue bantam and little sweetie. When you finish picking your winter peas next spring, plant climbing pole beans, such as blue lake or Kentucky blue.

Cucumbers do wonders grown on trellises and walls. Choose a shady location in the afternoon to prevent scorch of the fruit and leaves. Like tomatoes, cucumbers stop producing in the heat, but continue to grow. The variety Armenian is by far the best for our desert.

Consider using flat-sided half-pots in all sizes for wall mounting to dress up walls. They do best on walls receiving morning sun. Pots hanging from walls exposed to direct afternoon sun dry out fast. Regardless of what you use, water your plants with an automatic watering system using drip emitters to water individual pots.

Don't forget the top of walls. Position pots to provide a crowning effect of greenery and color. Use plants with cascading growth to create these "hanging gardens." The toughest of these are trailing rosemary, cascading petunia, hearts and flowers, and trailing periwinkle. In addition to plants, use wall plaques, fountains and colorful paint to enhance your wall garden.

ILLUMINATE AND DECORATE

Light up your landscape. Get ready to add a unique touch to your outdoor oasis. See how Tim Dunnigan and Ted Hanlon use lighting and art to brighten up their landscapes. That's at 6 p.m. Wednesday at the Springs Preserve, 333 S. Valley View Blvd. To reserve a seat, call 822-7786.

BEST FRUIT AND NUT TREES

To grow great-tasting fruit in your yard, you just need to choose the correct varieties. Master gardener Kathie Slaughter will talk about the best varieties for your yard and how to care for them at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the University of Nevada Cooperative Extension Learning Center, 8050 Paradise Road, at the Windmill exit on the Las Vegas Beltway.

FALL FLOWER SHOW

"Mysterious" is the theme of this fall's flower show. Note the titles of categories designers came up with: "Stone Heads," "Tower of Babel," "Atlantis," "Bermuda Triangle," "Area 51" and "Apparitions." I know the titles will get me there just to see the creations. The two-day show is from noon to 4 p.m. Saturday and Oct. 26 at the Nevada Garden Club Center 3333 W. Washington Ave. If you want to enter a design, call Barbara Appel at 459-0662.

Linn Mills writes a garden column each Sunday. You can reach him at lin.mills@ springspreserve.org or call him at 822-7754.