Category: life

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!

From “The Growing Anticipation of Spring” in On Gardening by Henry Mitchell:

“The day before the cold and snow began I planted two clematis, knowing snow was predicted. As always, when you find clematis at this time of year in cartons, the plants had already sprouted, and that soft growth will be killed. The alternative is to plant it in a pot, keeping it cool and damp until mid-April, but when I have done that in the past I have neglected the pots and only got the plants set out months later.

“One thing a novice may not know is that the clematis roots, which are like leather shoelaces, are rammed into the little pots and packed with peat to keep them moist. That is good. But when planted in the garden (in a one-cubic-foot hole, with plenty of leaf mold) the roots should be dusted free of the stuff in the little pot and spread out, and the crown of the plant (where the stem joins the roots) set a full two inches below soil level.

“Another thing not obvious to gardeners the first time a clematis is planted is that the stem is quite delicate and brittle where it joins the roots and is easily broken off. Use care when unpotting and never hold the plant by its stem but by its roots.

“Even if the top is killed, new growth will rise from below ground, and by the third year the stems will be like modest ropes and the plant will cover a space the size of a door.”

From “Clematis” in Jewel Sensed: Poems by David Jaffin: 

These white-

climbing flow
ers at lyrical-

rhythmic in
tervals to

their chosen
taste for up

lifting-color
ings.

Hello!

One day last week, in my back yard whilst I was sound asleep, this happened…

… and me and the dog spent the better part of that day photographing these fresh Clematis flowers, even as they continued opening while the photo session went on. I got a little carried away (as one does!) and ended up with enough photographs for two posts, but it just seemed imperative to capture their images before they started to thin out and drift away. It’s what they wanted, I’m sure….

These Clematis have a story (see Clematis Reincarnated), one that has not yet completed. They were originally among several Clematis plants that I had in pots on my back steps years ago, that got frozen to burnt, black shreds in those pots when we had an extended deep freeze one late winter. As an experiment, I took the crispy remnants of their roots and hopefully transplanted them into a large pot where a Concord grapevine lives (the pot is about three feet high and two feet in diameter, with a steel trellis), hoping they’d find their way back. They didn’t do much the first year — producing just a small handful of flowers — but this year, they seemed to have found their footing (their rooting?) and spread across the top of the pot and up the trellis supporting the grapevine. They want to climb, after all.

There are two or possibly three varieties now flowering among these vines, though most of the flowers resemble that of a Bernadine Clematis (see Bernadine Clematis) I bought about five years ago — with the stripes less prominent than they originally were. This post features Bernadine’s descendants; the next post includes the other varieties, which (unlike the Bernadines) still have distinct purple or violet striping through each of the flower petals, but were not identified with a name other than “Clematis” when I bought them.

These Bernadine progeny, as you can see, might technically be considered white in color now, but in diffused sunlight they take on a light blue cast; and, in warmer sunlight, it’s easy to find violet or purple among the petals. That’s often the case with flowers in blue or purple shades: the color of surrounding light shifts the shades toward cooler (blue) or warmer (purple) tones, and that shift is actually easy to see in programs like Lightroom where they can be rendered in either color (or anywhere in between) and still look natural. As I look at them through the back door, though, they most often show off this dusty or muted light blue, so that’s how I chose to present them here.

In these galleries, we transition from some of the buds and vines with flowers in the background — the vines often make elegant and captivating twists — to single flowers in full, then to closeups of the flower’s central structures. Clematis are members of the Ranunculaceae or Buttercup family, many of which have a similarly complex central structure that contains reproductive organs, colors and shapes that attract pollinators, and of course the valuable pollen the bugs are after that also ensures continued life for the plants.

Thanks for taking a look!