Strongylodon macrobotrys

There are few flowers this color anywhere: a greenish turquoise, almost metallic, hanging in long racemes of claw-shaped blooms. The jade vine is a climbing legume from the forests of the Philippines, where bats and birds pollinate it, and it is now considered vulnerable in the wild through deforestation and the loss of those same pollinators.

This is a true liana, not a pot climber: allow 4 to 6 meters and give it a permanent, strong structure — a pergola, a mature tree, an arbor — before you plant it, because it will fill it. It wants high light and humid lowland conditions (zones 10 to 12). Allow three to five years to the first flowering, and expect twenty to thirty years of life.

Its role in the system is support rather than production: the flowers feed pollinators, and a mature vine's foliage gives shade and shelter on whatever structure carries it. In a consortium it goes where there is high light and something firm to hold it — not over a young plant, which would not take the weight — and it is pruned after flowering to keep the volume in check.