Grape vines in the wild: what they looked like before domestication
I’m fascinated by wild vines. We are so used to seeing vines growing neatly in rows in vineyards that sometimes it’s easy to forget that these are wild plants, used to growing as lianas. This is the term used to describe plants like the grape vine, which is a structural parasite, using other plants for support.
Plants battle other plants for resources, and these include nutrients, water but also light. This is why trees do well: they grow tall and they can intercept the light that other plants can’t reach. But growing tall requires the investment in structure that will support growing tall, and it means they grow slowly. They play the long game.
Vines take advantage of this investment, and they are one of a group of plants who borrow from the hard work of others. They don’t invest in a strong woody trunk. Instead, their trunks are spindly and thin, and they have specialised structures called tendrils that allow them to attach firmly to the plants they use for support.
They also have other adaptations that make them suited to this way of life. The first is a root system that’s able to enter ground already well colonized by the roots of other plants and compete for nutrients. The second is they are relatively drought resistant, because they are fighting for a water supply already used by other plants.
The goal of the vine is to reach the canopy of the trees they are growing up, and there get their photosynthetic fix. And where they manage to reach sunlight, this is a good place to produce flower clusters and then bunches of grapes, which are designed to attract birds who eat these grapes – when they are ripe – and then disperse the seeds.
In Eurasia, the home of Vitis vinifera, there aren’t so many wild vines left, partly because of phylloxera, but also because of loss of habitat. But in North America, native vines are still easy to spot. I recently saw some in Niagara, Canada, and also in Sonoma, California.
Here are some annotated pictures of these vines.
Finally, there are some ancient vine trellising techniques that mimic the way vines would have been grown in the wild. This involves growing vines up trees, and you can still find this occasionally. These two pictures of vigna maritata were taken in Chianti Classico, in an old plot.
