Vines

Overview

Vines are plants that climb. The one people grow on purpose is the grapevine of the Leeward Folds, kept in rows on the warmest terraces, where Halflings stoop over the vine rows through the summer and press the grapes in autumn. Everywhere else vines are wild: brambles and climbers in hedges and woods, ivy on walls and trees, tangles in the marshes. The vine is also a sign. A ribbon of living green vine binds the sheaf of Anvelle the Harvest-Mother, and vines are what she and the mages of Nature Magic call out of the ground. The vines of other planes and of the Dark Entities are another matter, described with the Verdant Expanse Flora and the Xylos Mycelium.

Appearance

The terrace vine

A fold grapevine is pruned each winter back to a gnarled, dark, shaggy-barked trunk no higher than a Halfling's chest, from which new green canes spring every year. Its leaves are broad, five-lobed, and toothed like an open hand, bright green in summer and red-gold in autumn. Curling tendrils grip the stakes and wires of the row. The flowers are tiny and greenish and smell faintly sweet; the grapes that follow hang in tight bunches, hard and green through the summer, then softening to amber-green or dusky purple under a whitish bloom. A vine row in late summer smells of warm leaves and, once the wasps find it, split fruit.

Wild vines and ivy

Wild vines in the basin hedges and the forest edge are lighter and ranker, with smaller sour grapes or none. Brambles arch and root where their tips touch the ground. Ivy is evergreen, dark, glossy, and slow, its leaves three- or five-pointed on climbing stems and heart-shaped on the flowering tops, and it holds to stone and bark with tiny clinging roots. Its late flowers feed the last insects of the year and its black berries feed birds in winter. In the fens and marshes of the lowlands, soft-stemmed climbers wind through reed and willow.

Habitat and Range

The cultivated vine needs warmth, sun, and shelter, and in the Folds it takes the warmest terraces, sharing them with the orchards. Wild vines and ivy grow wherever there is something to climb: hedges, woodland edges, old walls, ruins, and riverside thickets on both sides of Caeldon.

Behaviour and Temperament

A vine left alone grows long and fruits little, which is why the folds prune it hard. Late frost takes its buds, wet summers rot the bunches, and birds and wasps take the ripe grapes. Wild ivy is patient and unstoppable: given a few generations, it pulls down the wall it climbs.

Life Cycle

A grapevine is propagated from cuttings, bears in its third or fourth year, and fruits for generations if it is kept. Leaves open late in spring, flowers in early summer, and grapes ripen into autumn, when they are picked by hand.

Uses and Dangers

Fold grapes are eaten fresh, dried into raisins on the drying floors beside the other fruit, and pressed on the shared presses of the orchard leagues; the faint sourness of the presses in late summer comes partly from them. Some of the juice becomes wine. Grape wine is a far-side drink: no grapes grow in the cradle-web, and wine there is fruit and flower wine of elder, berries, and honey. That is the wine offered with bread and flowers to the river at the Festival of the First Flow of Serovan the River-King. Wild vines give baskets, ties, and a little poor fruit; ivy gives winter fodder and nothing else anyone wants.

Lore and Belief

Anvelle's sheaf of golden wheat is bound with a ribbon of living green vine, and basin farmers read the vine as the tie between one harvest and the next. Her Root-Grab raises vines, roots, or thorns from the ground to entangle enemies or protect the innocent, and leaves the spot barren if it is used too often. A vine that springs up overnight around a boundary stone is taken in the basins as a sign of her displeasure with whoever moved it.

Orcs of the Windscar honour ivy in the sign of Ushkar the Ancestor-Warden: a stone stele of names topped with a skull wreathed in ivy, and his hair is dried grey ivy that never wilts. To them ivy is what clings and does not let go, as the kindreds cling to their dead. Halflings say a vine is the most honest plant in a fold, because it gives exactly as much as it is pruned for.

Where It Appears

• Gods:
• Magic:
• Planes and Dark Entities: