Here’s a wild-looking corner of the house, before I cut the grass the other day:
On the left is clematis, climbing a trellis on the wall. In the middle is a pink rose. At bottom right right is the base of a vigorous vine, hops, that really needs a support of its own (there used to be a tree trunk, but it rotted away). Currently, the hops scrambles up the stem of the rose until it reaches the top, where it grabs on to the clematis’s trellis and keeps going until it cannot go any higher.
The funny thing is the rose; it’s suspended in thin air. Without the vine tying it to the trellis, it would collapse to the ground. With such big groups of blooms on their ends, its stems are too long and flimsy to support themselves; they would overturn.
So who is supporting whom? It’s a symbiotic arrangement, with both sides benefitting, but if the great gardener in the sky were an architecture student, she’d be told that this is a classic example of confused structural thinking. Actually, I’m not sure she’d even get in to architecture school, poor old thing.
A Bad Guide 
We grow a hop up a dead conifer; every autumn we cut it down – the hop – and drape it along the RSJ that supports the absence of the wall that used to separate the kitchen from the scullery. The old vine goes into the compost bin. All this because Dearieshe was a Maid.of Kent.
I love both the picture and the discussion. Long live confused structural thinking! (However, you are reminding me that it will soon be time to mow the lawn again.)
Thanks, Language.
Dearie do you get a hop crop? We don’t. Something to do with male or female plants.
Yes we do, and you’ve just inspired a Cunning Plan to embitter some of the excessively sweet booze that lurks under the stairs.
It’s your whisky taster’s genes.
that is a magnificent tale to start the morning with – thanks! What looks like a cluttered mess to the gardening fascists who insist on unnatural order everywhere is in fact complex thee way symbiosis. Not only is that inspiring, it’s my new explanation of my office floor.
How lovely of you to see that story in an overgrown corner of your garden.
Like two drunks leaning on each other.