UP THE GARDEN PATH

Louise Tomlin takes a look at the captivating climbers that are Clematis

At last, we are into late spring, almost summer, and everywhere I look it seems that there’s so much colour and richness out there in the gardens. It’s a joy to behold, maybe it’s because to me has felt like such a long dreary winter, that the sudden contrast, feels almost like stepping from an old black and white movie into glorious ‘Technicolour’.

One of the plants I’ve been meaning to mention and find out more about is putting on a colourful show in the many gardens I pass on my walks. It’s a great front garden plant, as popular as the glorious wisterias that grace many walls at this time of year, and it’s another climber, Clematis. Equally at home, clinging to house walls, or covering fences and scrambling over other structures, with swathes of leathery leaves and abundant flowers.

I have loved these beautiful climbers since having my head turned by them as a young gardener. To me, they were the archetypal flowering beauty, gracefully growing over a cottage style garden archway, as the epitome of my young idyllic and rather romantic view of what my future garden would be like.

The genus name clematis comes from the Greek word for a climbing plant, there are over 300 species and they are related to the Ranunculaceae, the buttercup family. They come in many colours, white, yellow, pink, and various shades of purple, violet and blues. I’ve noticed the flowers can be very simple singles with just four petals, sometimes they are bi-coloured with bars of different colour down the centre of the petals, whilst others have many rows of petals grouped around the central crown of pronounced stamens, which in some examples become enlarged hairy or feathery projections, which allows their seeds to be dispersed.

Interestingly there is a native variety called Clematis vitalba, which is prevalent in hedgerows in the UK which we call ‘Old Man’s Beard’ because of its white-greyish hairy appearance throughout the winter months. It’s also known as ‘Traveller’s Joy’. The seeds provide a vital source of food for birds, the stems were also woven into baskets in the past, and it is also said that the plant was used in medicinal treatments, having anti-inflammatory properties.

There are many species of Clematises distributed all over the world including America and Asia, with Japanese and Chinese native species that had been cultivated into garden plants in those countries in the 17th century. Some of these exotic plants were then brought to Europe in the 18th century.

I mainly associate Clematises with being spring and summer blooming, however surprisingly, I found out a few years ago that there are winter flowering varieties and even evergreen ones too, so there’s a lot more to this family than immediately meets the eye.

I previously mentioned having fallen in love with them when I was younger, sadly I had my heart broken repeatedly by several that I proudly planted in my garden. The relationship was going well, as is often the case in the early stages of the affair, the beautiful specimens were climbing and twining up a newly installed garden arch, as per my youthful, romantic dream. The flowers started to come and everything in the garden seemed to be lovely until disaster struck. I noticed some dark spots on the leaves, then some stems started to shrivel and go black. Eventually, this spread through the whole plants. It was a bitter disappointment. I tried cutting them down to the ground and this seemed to work as new shoots started to grow, however, the recovery was short-lived lived and the same thing happened again. I researched it and talked to fellow gardeners, we didn’t have Google in those days. Apparently it was a well-known problem called Clematis wilt which is usually caused by a fungus called Calophoma clematidina.

There are steps like deep mulching and chemical control measures you can take to try to eradicate this nasty condition, but nothing worked for my poor Clematises, so in the end I decided to cut my losses, and went in search of a new plant love. Please don’t let me put you off though, I’ve seen many beautiful examples of this beautiful plant that are thriving and showing no sign of any disease, I’ve taken some photos of them to show you here, as proof.

Maybe it’s just me being unlucky in Clematis Love?