From “Clambering for Attention” in The Story of Flowers and How They Changed the Way We Live by Noel Kingsbury:
“Clematis are now one of the most important groups of garden plants, with dwarf ones, ideal for small gardens, balconies and even window boxes, selling in their millions. The plants have, however, come a long way. The very modestly flowering European species appear to have been grown in gardens from the sixteenth century onwards, but it was the opening up of China and Japan in the nineteenth century that led to the large-flowered hybrids we know today. Far Eastern growers had for centuries had plants with showy flowers and, crucially, a tendency to flower on side shoots. This ability to flower low down makes them very useful as garden plants, as is shown by the habit of growing them on obelisks made from wooden trellis.
“A breakthrough was made in 1858 by the English nurseryman George Jackman, who crossed an existing hybrid with the European C. viticella and the East Asian C. lanuginosa. The resulting showy, vigorous plant proved a huge success. Meanwhile, C. montana had arrived from the Himalayas, introduced by the wife of the governor general of British India. It too was a great success, clambering up the sides of British country houses, along garden walls and even to the tops of quite substantial trees, smothering everything with pink flowers for a few weeks in early summer….
“From the great botanic gardens of St Petersburg came C. tangutica in the late nineteenth century, a botanical outcome of the ‘great game’, when British and Russian explorers were both investigating, and seeking to dominate, Central Asia. It and similar species are vigorous, and their strangely thick yellow petals are borne, usefully, in late summer.”
From “The Wood-Pile” by Robert Frost in Collected Poems of Robert Frost:
Out walking in the frozen swamp one grey day,
I paused and said, ‘I will turn back from here.
No, I will go on farther — and we shall see.’
The hard snow held me, save where now and then
One foot went through. The view was all in lines
Straight up and down of tall slim trees
Too much alike to mark or name a place by
So as to say for certain I was here
Or somewhere else: I was just far from home….
And then there was a pile of wood…
It was a cord of maple, cut and split
And piled-and measured, four by four by eight.
And not another like it could I see.
No runner tracks in this year’s snow looped near it.
And it was older sure than this year’s cutting,
Or even last year’s or the year’s before.
The wood was grey and the bark warping off it
And the pile somewhat sunken.
Clematis
Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle….
Hello!
This is the second of two posts featuring photos of resurgent Clematis from my garden. The first post — with my backyard history of these plants — is Hello, Clematis! (1 of 2).
As with the previous post, here we start with some of the buds and vines posing in the morning sun. These are followed by images of full flowers — those with prominent purple or pink stripes through their petals, possibly the Clematis lanuginosa variant described in the quotation above. Toward the end, there are closeups of the Clematis flower’s complex central structure.
Thanks for taking a look!




























