Question

Which plant is described by these clues? The genus name is Greek for a water vessel, taken from the shape of the little seed pots rather than from anything about the flowers. The tiny fertile flowers ripen into small dry pots that open by a hole at the top between two persistent horns, never into fleshy one-seeded fruit. Its leaves sit in opposite pairs, simple and toothed, with no appendages of any kind where the stalk meets the stem. The flower head carries two kinds of flower at once: a crowd of minute fertile ones in the middle, ringed by a few large sterile ones whose showy parts are enlarged {sepals} rather than petals. Each of those sterile flowers spreads four rounded showy blades, not a single one. It hauls itself 40 to 60 feet (12 to 18 m) up trunks and walls on short {adventitious} rootlets thrown out along the stems, and its older wood peels away in reddish-brown flakes. The blades are thin and {deciduous}, up to 6 inches (15 cm) long, toothed all round, and they turn clear yellow before falling. Its subspecies epithet points to the long leaf stalks, and this eastern race is the one with more and larger sterile flowers and upwards of fifteen {stamens} in each fertile flower. It climbs trees and rock outcrops in montane forest in Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the Russian Far East, up to about 6,000 feet (1,830 m). Gardeners reach for it as the standard self-clinging climber for a shady north wall, and confuse it endlessly with a Japanese vine whose sterile flowers hang a single showy blade instead of four.

Accepted Answer

Hydrangea anomala ssp. petiolaris

Name That Plant #065