While we're meeting the ivy, we mustn't keep quiet some other 'climbing' plants that can live in rooms and are also called the ivy, albeit incorrectly.
Pay attention to the kangaroo vine, or more precisely, to the Cissus antarctica from the Vitaceae family, originating in Australia, though its close relatives grow also in New Zealand, and on the islands of Java, Sumatra and Borneo.
The kangaroo vine isn't a relative of the grapevine, but of course it doesn't have anything common with the ivy either, since the ivy 'climbs' the walls with extra roots, or, to use imagery, with 'legs', and the kangaroo vine -- with 'hands', or more precisely, with tendrils.
Indeed, the kangaroo vine, with its simple oval toothy leaves forms tendrils. The tendrils sometimes develop on the same branch where leaves are, sometimes alongside the flowers, but mostly they avoid sunlight and seemingly seek escape on the wall, getting into dark cracks. The tendril, coming into contact with a hard object, forms on its tip a bulb the size of a pinhead, which then grows wider and forms the shape of a seal. A sticky sap fixes the tendril's seal with a surface. The attached tendril continues to grow and simultaneously - to wind up like a spring. Even a strong wind cannot rip off the kangaroo vine from its base, only pulls at the branches somewhat. And when the wind dies down, the tendrils, like springs, pull closer to the wall or the tree. The tendrils on the old stems die-off, but the growing new stems sprout new ones.
And the kangaroo vine slowly grows upwards, seemingly 'hand'-walking.
The roots send water up the kangaroo vine's long stems with such a force that the natives of Java slice them and drink the leaking juice. According to the travelers, a glass gets filled with a cool drink fairly quickly. They call the kangaroo vine there a 'plant spring'.
Don't you dare cut the roots of your kangaroo vine. Weak roots in a small pot can hardly send a lot of water up a stem. Don't kill the plant for several drops of watery and not even sweet juice.
One of the species of the kangaroo vine grows in the forests of Sumatra like a liana, climbing trees, but its roots trail along the ground, where the elephants and other big beasts walk on to their drinking spots.
In 1818 the botanist Robert Brown got a letter. This letter was from the scientist doctor Joseph Arnoldi, who explored the forests of Sumatra.
The letter soon became known to the scientists all over the world, since it talked about a strange plant:
"With joy I tell You that here I discovered the greatest wonder of the plan word.
I accidentally departed some way from my companions, when my Malay servant ran up to me with eyes bulging from surprise and crying: 'Come, come here, master! Here is a flower very big, very amazing, very beautiful!'
I immediately followed him into the thicket for about 100 footsteps, where he had shown me, beneath a bush, on the very ground, a very amazing flower. It sat on a thin, no thicker than two fingers, horizontal root. I cut it off with a knife and brought into a tent. I immediately noticed an entire swarm of flies at the the stamen, where they, most likely, laid their eggs. The flower smelled of rotten ham...
To tell the truth: if I was alone and didn't have comrades with me, I would've been afraid beholding such a huge flower, whose size surpassed all that I've seen and heard before."
The flower with five petals of meaty color, with whitish warts, with a ring that had an indentation in the middle for the stamens, was 3 m in circumference and 1 m across.
This flower grew close to a path trampled by elephants.
Further studies revealed that the flower has no leaves, nor stem, nor roots. The flower was located on a foreign root - a kangaroo vine's root. This flower was a parasite of the kangaroo vine, and the kangaroo vine, as the scientists say, was its' host.
The sticky fruits, forming from this gigantic flower, are trampled by elephant feet and the small seeds are spread by these animals further down a forest path, and some of them get onto kangaroo vine roots that are free from ground.
A small seed, after getting beneath the skin of a kangaroo vine root, grows and spreads its suckers inside the root and stem, sucking juice from the host. And huge buds mature and grow thanks to the kangaroo vine's juice, becoming the size of a big head of cabbage, and then they sprout into the biggest flowers in the world, called the 'Rafflesia arnoldii'.