When you step into a living room - your own or someone else's - where a vine softly frames a large window with green leaf tracery, you feel an effect of gracious living and the pleasant kinship of the room with its outdoor view. When you entertain - or are entertained on a terrace or patio with the family or friends even with the smell of the with the BBQ smoking away and the natural way vines spill down from containers along the edge or up and down the steps, your eyes dwell on the refreshment in well-planned design.

When you step up to a garden bed - familiar because you planted it, or intriguing because you didn't - you appreciate its beauty more if it is unified by a flowering or foliage vine spreading along a fence or wall in the background.

This is the some of the decorative value of vines. Their relaxed, flowing lines blend one element with another, create smooth transitions, soften harsh geometric lines or large, bare areas. Vines are mobile, not static; exuberant, not depressing; in tune with today's vitality and restlessness, yet somehow soothing, too.

Vines are both artistic and functional in container gardening - a popular way of decorating with all kinds of indoor and outdoor plants such as the sansevieria. The basis is the container or planter, mobile or permanent, carefully designed in relation to its decorative use and the plants it contains.

Anyone can garden in containers, no matter how small his house or yard, how limited his time and money, how impermanent his residence in apartment or house, or how deep-seated his desire for frequent and refreshing change. And anyone who does garden in containers will use vines to soften lines, accent points of interest, tie a group of plants or arrangement of containers together, or simply to have artistry of their own.