Make Your Climbing Potted Plants Look Fuller With One Essential Tip

Is there a sparse, straggly plant in your home that's refusing to cooperate with your dream of living in an indoor jungle? No shame, we've all been there. When you buy a climbing plant you imagine that soon you'll be greeted with lush greenery cascading from your bookshelves or flowing up your walls but sometimes, months later, they still look thin and let's be honest, a bit pitiful.

But don't give up yet. Outside of a tight watering schedule and good old-fashioned patience, there's another secret to transforming those climbers into showstoppers and that is simply giving them proper support. Using a trellis to support plants or adding vine wire doesn't just keep them neat and tidy — it actually tricks them into growing fuller foliage.

Here's how this works: When plants like pothos and philodendrons are left to their own devices, they will continue to sprawl outward looking everywhere for something to grasp and hold onto (in nature, this would probably be a tree). So if you give them support, when their vines or stems touch it, they will either produce more aerial roots at those points or they'll wrap their vines around the structure, attaching themselves to it and continuing to climb in that direction. Nature is kind of magic like that. By training your plant along a wire frame or trellis, you're basically giving it more frequent points to branch out onto. Therefore, not only are they going in the direction you want, you're giving them more opportunity to grow.

Lucky for budding plant parents everywhere, getting started with plant supports isn't complicated at all. Your local garden center should sell coils of vine wire that will allow you to customize your support to make it work for your space and type of plant. If you have a smaller plant in a smaller pot, form your wires into a sort of tent or teepee shape by anchoring them all in the soil and connecting them above the plant. This way your plant will have four different paths to choose and follow upwards. If want your plant to hang from a basket as opposed to climb, create more of a horizontal grid instead so the plant can stretch across the wire and hang down like a canopy.

And when it comes to supporting your climbers, timing definitely matters. The younger your plant when you support them with wire or a wall trellis, the easier they'll be to train in a specific way or direction. But that's not to say you can't teach an old plant new tricks, you just may need to be more patient (and be careful not to snap any stems from forcing them). And remember to check your supports occasionally as plants grow, as stems can become constricted by wires if left unchecked, so give them room to breathe by loosening ties, using softer ties or upgrading to a larger support system when they outgrow it.