Common Name: Trumpet Creeper, Trumpet Vine
Description: Deciduous scrambling shrubs or woody vines, often climbing and clinging by aerial rootlets.
Leaves opposite, imparipinnately compound (1-pinnately compound with a terminal leaflet), without tendrils; leaflets serrate.
Inflorescences terminal, shortly paniculate; flowers in clusters. Flowers slightly zygomorphic. Calyx campanulate, subleathery, irregularly 5-lobed (5-dentate). Corolla campanulate-funnelform (trumpet-shaped), slightly bilabiate (2-lipped), with 5 spreading lobes, orange, red-orange/orange-red or red. Stamens 4, didynamous, curved, included. Ovary 2-locular, base surrounded by a large disc.
Fruits an elongated (narrowly elliptic-oblong to linear), ± woody capsule dehiscing loculicidally. Seeds numerous, compressed, membranous, with semi-transparent wings.
Distribution and occurrence: World: 2 species, East Asia, North America; Australia 1 species and a hybrid, naturalised.
Its habit as a deciduous climbing plant with clasping and clamping areal roots (similar to those in Ivy)helps distinguish Campsis from other naturalised Bignoniaceae taxa in New South Wales. Sometimes cultivated Chinese Trumpet Vine Campsis grandiflora (Thunb.) K.Schum. differs from the other Campsis species and the hybrid in its leaflets being glabrous. Key adapted from R. Spencer, Horticultural Flora of South-eastern Australia Vol. 4: 294–295 (2002).
Text by L.J. Murray, following Flora of China Vol. 18, p. 220; updated May 2017, P.G. Kodela
Taxon concept: Australian Plant Census (accessed May 2017)
| | Key to the species | |
| 1 | Corolla tube more than twice the length of the calyx; corolla lobes 15–25 (?–30) mm wide | Campsis radicans |
| Corolla tube mostly less than twice as long as the calyx; corolla lobes mostly 27–40 mm wide | Campsis x tagliabuana |
|
