Supporting Plants in the Landscape - With the exception of vines, most plants are supposed to stand upright and support themselves in their natural setting. In the home landscape, we often need or want to give artificial support to plants for a number of reasons. At times, we crowd plants causing them to grow artificially tall (etiolation) so they need support to prevent them from falling over. We have also developed plants with unnaturally large flowers and the stems of the plant are not able to support them. As previously mentioned, many vining plants such as clematis need to be provided with support structures or they will begin to crawl along the ground.