Tropaeolum peregrinum

Family / Families: Tropaeolaceae
Scientific Name(s): Tropaeolum peregrinum L.
Location(s): near Fairbanks, Alaska, USA (cultivated)
Entry Author(s): Daniel Mosquin
Copyright Holder(s): Daniel Mosquin
Image Permissions: Please contact the copyright holder for permission to use.
Image License: Creative Commons License
Tags: Brassicales, named by Linnaeus, Photo by Daniel, Tropaeolaceae

Flower and foliage of Tropaeolum peregrinum

Native to Peru, Tropaeolum peregrinum is widely cultivated as an ornamental. In tropical areas, it perennates, persisting from year to year. In harsher climates, including Alaska where this photograph was taken, it is grown as a horticultural annual.

What constitutes an “annual” is discussed near the start of the Horticulture Training Program here at UBC. For botanists, the meaning of annual is relatively straightforward: a species that completes its life cycle over the span of a growing season, starting as seed and ending with that now-grown plant producing seed and then dying. There is a bit of a fuzziness around the term, in that annual seems to imply once per year. However, in places like the Sonoran Desert where there are two distinct rainy seasons in a calendar year, an annual species may cycle through two growing seasons in one revolution of the Earth around the sun.

For horticulturists in temperate parts of the world, though, annual refers not only to annuals in the botanical sense, but also plants which might survive more than one growing season but for some set of climatic factors. What is a horticultural annual to someone in Irkutsk may be a “sometimes annual, sometimes perennial” to a horticulturist in Sapporo, which in turn may be simply be a perennial to a horticulturist in tropical Pisco. Horticulturists also have to contend with a series of modifying terms, that often attempt to describe when a horticultural annual can be planted based on levels of frost-hardiness and cold-tolerance: hardy annuals, half-hardy annuals, tender annuals, and tender perennials used as annuals (let’s not get started on the different systems used for classifying hardiness…). It’s all relative, as they say.

Two common names for Tropaeolum peregrinum are canary-creeper and canary vine. The Wikipedia entry on Tropaeolum peregrinum states it may scramble to 2.5m (8 ft.) in height, but I wonder if that is accurate for both Alaska and Peru.