Of all the little climbers and twiners and creepers that call the Illawarra home, the Love Creepers (Glycine species) are some of the sweetest.

Delicate in appearance, their pale pinkish or lilac flowers add colour wherever they grow, and the clover-like leaves with three leaflets are very pretty.

Unlike some local vines (looking at you, Wonga Vine!), Love Creepers stay pretty small and won't overwhelm other plants. The densest growing Love Creeper we've ever had in our garden did form a bit of a mass at one point, as you can see in the picture below, but it was very far from starving the surrounding shrubs and young trees of light. 

There are three local Love Creeper species and they're fairly hard to tell apart; they all grow in quite similar ways except that Small-leaf Glycine and Variable Glycine are stoloniferous, meaning that plants produce roots at the nodes along their stems.

The third species, Glycine clandestina, which is also the most widely available, doesn't have stolons. Pro tip: it is easier to remove a plant that doesn't have stolons, so if you're not sure about growing a Love Creeper in your garden, maybe start with Glycine clandestina!  

The Glycines are in the Fabaceae or pea family (subfamily Faboideae), which means that they can fix nitrogen directly from the air and store it in their roots; this is a handy adaptation to conditions where there's sandy or low-nitrogen soil. When a Love Creeper dies and decomposes, the nitrogen it has fixed then becomes available to other plants.

They are good habitat plants, and the flowers attract many different insects. You will see Love Creepers growing in woodland and eucalypt forest right around the region, typically in areas with relatively high light levels. It is much more obvious when flowers are present, which can be for much of the year in good conditions.