Crossword-Solution: TWINERS 7 letters, 6 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 10

Thus a Phaseolus has to manufacture a stem three feet in length to reach a height of two feet above the ground, whereas a pea "which had ascended to the same height by the aid of its tendrils, was but little longer than the height reached." ("Climbing Plants" (2nd edition 1875), page 193.) Thus he was led on to the belief that TWINING is the more ancient form of climbing, and that tendril-climbers have been developed from twiners.

But in ascending the series from simple twiners to leaf-climbers, an important quality is added, namely sensitiveness to a touch, by which means the foot-stalks of the leaves or flowers, or these modified and converted into tendrils, are excited to bend round and clasp the touching object.

Many plants, which are not twiners, become in some degree twisted round their own axes; {9b} but this occurs so much more generally and strongly with twining-plants than with other plants, that there must be some connexion between the capacity for twining and axial twisting.

Nevertheless I do not wish to assert that they are never irritable; for the growing axis of the leaf-climbing, but not spirally twining, _Lophospermum scandens_ is, certainly irritable; but this case gives me confidence that ordinary twiners do not possess any such quality, for directly after putting a stick to the _Lophopermum_, I saw that it behaved differently from a true twiner or any other leaf-climber.

Our English twiners, as far as I have seen, never twine round trees, excepting the honeysuckle (_Lonicera periclymenum_), which I have observed twining up a young beech-tree nearly 4½ inches in diameter.