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.
Beautiful flower! These are cousins of nasturtiums, no? You can see the relationship in the flower shape. Are these edible too?
A small moose with splendid yellow antlers !
Beautiful and special!
How different are leaves and flowers from this one Tropaeolum polyphyllum, native to Argentina & Chile.
West Coast Seeds used to carry Canary Creeper. Kids loved having it pointed out that the flowers did indeed look like little yellow birds. I can only locate these seeds now in Ontario & the Maritimes. Anyone know of a local source in BC?
I’ve lately seem tender perennials referred to as ‘temperennials’.
I love that! Let’s keep it!
When I was a pup, plants with a rainfall dependent short growing season were labelled as “ephemeral” rather than annual. Desert flora have many such plants.
I was interested to see that your photo was taken in Alaska. Tropaeolum peregrinum used to be planted every year around the Commissioner’s mansion in Dawson City when it was the capital of the Yukon. When I was there about 20 years ago, the local heritage society was re-introducing the tradition.
Methods of classification are arbitrary at best. So many halophytes could be classified more accurately as xerophytes and vice versa.