I have a very strange-looking vine growing in my yard that neither I nor several local nurserymen have been able to identify. All, however, have been unhesitant in characterizing it as "a weed," and so I'm posting this here instead of in the Vines forum. My mother used to call it the "Haunted House Plant," and it does indeed look like it would be right at home with the Addams Family. I actually quite like the look of it and have just this morning potted a few

cuttings to see if they'll root.

The main stem of the vine is fluted, with ten lands and grooves around its circumference. It is a light grassy-green color all the way into the ground (i.e., no woody parts), and holds a lot of moisture. When the vine is cut into, the sap is pleasantly grassy-smelling. The main stem's diameter seems limited to about 3/8 of an inch. The terminal bud of the vine looks somewhat like the tip of an aspagagus spear.

The vine is not dense, but rather, very rangy. In the mature part of the vine, the nodes are roughly 8" apart. Now, the most fascinating thing to me about this vine is that each node always sprouts five very distinct structures:

1. A 5-lobed leaf that look vaguely like a maple leaf.

2. A single, pale yellow star-shaped flower (usually having five petals, but sometimes 6), on a short stalk that has a fuzzy green ball just below the flower.

3. A stalk bearing a number of spherical buds, many of which open up into additional 5-pointed pale yellow flowers, which look just like the flower mentioned in (2) abobe, but none of which have the "fuzzy green ball" on their stalks.

4. A stalk that bifurcates into two twisting, spiralling tendrils.

5. A stalk that I (computer geek that I once was) call the "recursive" stalk, because it has a terminal bud and grows out to form additional nodes (some more succussfully than others).

A photo showing the 5 structures from a single node (cut apart from one another), and several others, can be seen in my Flickr photostream. (They'd be in a set, but my Flicker Pro status expired and I haven't re-upped yet!)

Any help identifying this plant (or even just correcting my terminolgy -- I'm anything but an experienced plant person!) will be warmly appreciated!

Thanks,

Michael