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Tag: bernadine clematis

Bernadine Clematis, 2022 Version

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From Plant Families: A Guide for Gardeners and Botanists by Ross Bayton:

“[The Clematis] flower bud is enclosed by the sepals, which protect the inner workings of the flower. As it grows and expands, the sepals open up and become much more colorful, just like the petals within.”

From The Language of Flowers by Anne Pratt and Thomas Miller:

“Many plants, besides possessing tendrils, have a stem and leaf-stalks, which grow in a spiral slope, when the plant requires the support of another. Thus the traveler’s joy, or wild clematis, that beautiful ornament of our summer hedges, by its stems as well as tendrils, so clings to the bushes that it is impossible to sever a large portion without tearing it. The large clusters of flowers, and the numerous dark leaves, seeming to belong to the brambles among which they entwine, so closely are they interlaced by the convolutions of their stems.”

The fabulously oppressive heat and humidity that settled on large portions of the U.S. last week made outdoor activities — including photography! — possible only in short bursts, but it did give me some indoor time to work on a backlog of photos. This week is supposed to be even hotter, though much lower humidity may mean outdoor-things are more possible, especially in the mornings. Yesterday and today I heard the upcoming high temperatures referred to as a heatwave, heat blast, heat bomb, and heat dome — but I really think that if they’d just call it a “heat igloo” we’d all feel a lot cooler…. or not!

Earlier this year I posted photos of flowers from one of my clematis vines — see One Clematis, Two Clematis — but somehow I forgot about pictures I’d taken of another one: the Bernadine Clematis whose images appear below. My third clematis plant — a President Clematis (see President Clematis, from 2021) never bloomed this year: it started producing flower buds very early during a warm February, but they all got crinkled to death by a week of freezing temperatures shortly after. That’s a weird new weather pattern that This Gardener hasn’t quite figured out how to work with: early year temperatures in the 60s and 70s cause some plants (in my garden: clematis vines, hydrangeas, and ferns) to respond to the warmth by putting out delicate new growth too early, then they never quite recover from the freezing that follows.

I’ve posted photos of Bernadine here a few times; so this year I just took a double-handful of new photos, and focused on getting sharpness, color, and texture as correct and accurate as possible. This Bernadine blooms into a striking mix of blue, purple, violet, and magenta, in stripes that emanate from the center. The center structure features the deepest purple, so rich in color that it always reminds me of purple marzipan with a tiny yellow frosting cap. But I did not try to eat them, I promise; I only took their pictures.

Thanks for taking a look!

Bernadine Clematis

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From 100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names by Diana Wells:

“Clematis vines were growing all over the world, both wild and in gardens….

“The most popular clematis grown is the gorgeous purple C. × jackmanii. It was bred in the Jackman nursery in 1858 and is generally believed to be a cross between three other varieties. George Jackman published The Clematis as a Garden Flower, in which he suggested planting a clematis garden with the vines trained over picturesque old tree stumps. By then though, a new fashion had started of pegging down clematis vines to cover the ground and fill flower beds. William Robinson also suggested they should be allowed to grow through shrubs such as azaleas, ‘throwing veils over the bushes here and there.’

“The new British hybrids were introduced to America in the 1890s, but the British ‘wild’ garden style of Gertrude Jekyll and William Robinson never really became fashionable here, probably because America was wild enough as it was. Andrew Jackson Downing, the American landscape gardener, said that clematis ‘are capable of adding to the interest of the pleasure ground, when they are planted so as to support themselves on the branches of trees.’ They do not seem to have been allowed to sprawl over the flower beds.

“Clematis are most often seen nowadays growing up mailboxes, where they hang nicely in ‘veils.’ The flowers are breathtakingly beautiful, especially when seen up close — which we have an opportunity to do whenever we collect our junk mail and bills.”

In my garden, the first clematis vine to produce buds and flowers is a Bernadine Clematis. The photos below span a couple of weeks, from the early April arrival of wee buds to the appearance of full grown flowers by mid-month.

The first two images might be photos of the smallest flower bud I’ve photographed; it was barely an eighth of an inch long, yet still capable of reflecting sunbeams in such a way that it looks like it’s got its own light source. It seemed too fragile to even stay on the vine, and yet….

…. a few days later, the buds (and vines) are a lot more robust. The second photo below shows the same bud from above, in its upstanding position.

I took these photos a couple of days before the flowers opened. In the last three images you can see hints at some of the color that will make its way into nature’s final version of the flower.

Here are two of the blooms, over a few days. The first four photos were taken two or three days before the last four. The intensity of the colors wanes somewhat as the flower gets larger. By the time the petals have reached full size, they’ve flattened quite a bit, and less shadow along the petals’ centers reflects light differently. The blue color softens and purple shifts to lavender, getting lighter each day. The petals will turn almost white, until they detach in the wind or rain and blow away.

Thanks for taking a look!

Spring 2020: April Colors 7 (Clematis in Bloom, 3 of 3)

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From The Reason for Flowers: Their History, Culture, Biology, and How They Change Our Lives by Stephen Buchmann:

“Before recorded history, all cultures collected, used, and admired flowers not only for utilitarian purposes, but for their elusive fragrances and ephemeral forms that, ironically, symbolized recurring vigor and even immortality. They have enthralled and seduced us, exploiting entire civilizations to enhance their sex lives and spread their seeds. We give and receive flowers as tributes, and to commemorate life’s many triumphs and everyday events. Flowers accompany us from cradle to grave. As spices, they flavor our foods and beverages. We harvest their delicate scents, combining them into extravagantly expensive mixtures, for perfuming our bodies to evoke passion and intrigue….

“Flowers inspired the first artists, writers, photographers, and scientists, just as they do today on street corners, in florist shops and farmers’ markets, in books, paintings, sculptures, and commercial advertising. They moved online with ease.”

From Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn:

“Spring comes, the birds sing in the trees once again, leaves return to the trees which lost them, flowers bloom in the high meadows and on the slopes, streams overflow with waters of melting snow. Through it all, the mountain continues to sit, unmoved by the weather, by what happens on the surface, by the world of appearances…. As we sit holding this image in our mind, we can embody the same unwavering stillness and rootedness in the face of everything that changes in our own lives over seconds, hours, and years.…

“May we continue to give ourselves over to what is deepest and best in ourselves, over and over and over again, encouraging those seeds of our truest nature to grow and flower and — for the sake of all beings near and far, known and unknown — nourish our lives and work and world from moment to moment, and from day to day.”

Here we are, on the last day of the month … we made it through April, mostly hunkered down but with occasional outdoor excursions, observing the birds that still sang, the trees that waved to life in their varied shades of green, and of course the plants and flowers that unrolled Spring 2020 like a blanket of color, texture, and shape. What will May bring? More uncertainty, more unknowns, probably more confusion … and, for me, new collections of irises, wisteria, and spiderwort — from photos I’ve taken over the past few weeks — along with more photos of any other flashes of color that catch my eye.

For this last clematis collection, I altered variations of images from the previous two posts to remove the background — something that creates nice contrast with the purple, violet, and magenta colors prominent in these blooms. For the first gallery, I used Lightroom brushes to patiently paint the backgrounds black, following (in slow motion!) the outer lines created by each petal. For the second and third galleries (showing a Bernadine Clematis), I used radial filters instead of brushes, to create the impression of light fading from the center of the bloom to each petal’s edge.

The previous posts in this series are:

Spring 2020: April Colors 6 (Clematis in Bloom, 2 of 3): and

Spring 2020: April Colors 5 (Clematis in Bloom, 1 of 3); and

Spring 2020: April Colors 4 (White, Orange, and Red-Red); and

Spring 2020: April Colors 3 (Purple and Yellow (and Yellow and Purple)); and

Spring 2020: April Colors 2 (Catawba Grapevine); and

Spring 2020: April Colors 1.

Thanks for reading and taking a look! See you in May!

Spring 2020: April Colors 6 (Clematis in Bloom, 2 of 3)

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From The Reason for Flowers: Their History, Culture, Biology, and How They Change Our Lives by Stephen Buchmann:

“Most open by dawn’s first light or unfurl their charms as the day progresses. Others unwrap their diaphanous petals, like expensive presents, after dark, waiting for the arrival of beloved guests under a radiant moon. We know them as flowers. They are nature’s advertisements, using their beauty to beguile and reward passing insects or birds or bats or people willing to attend to their reproduction. The beauty of their shapes, colors, and scents transforms us through intimate experiences in our gardens, homes, offices, parks and public spaces, and wildlands. Importantly, flowers feed and clothe us. Their fruits and seeds keep the world’s 7.2 billion people from starvation. Flowers represent our past along with our hope for a bright future.“

So what is the point of a flower exactly? Have you ever wondered about that? I know I have, so I started reading Stephen Buchmann’s book The Reason for Flowers: Their History, Culture, Biology, and How They Change Our Lives (I am just on page ix) and the quote above is from the book’s preface. Normally I only include quotes here from books I’ve already read, but since I’ve got gobs and gobs of flower photos still to process and post (and more to take!), I think I’ll work through the book as I progress through the photos — and post about both. About halfway through the book is a section called “Flowers in Literature, Art, and Myth” that I imagine will be especially interesting to me as I often poke around trying to find references to flowers in fiction, poetry, art books, and photography books. I’ve never really puzzled that much about why I even like taking pictures of flowers (and plants and trees more generally); but like many things that stick to us as we grow up, I think that interest stems (at least partly) from exploring forests near my family home. I still remember the first time I came across a batch of tiny pink lady slipper orchids growing among shed needles of large pine trees while I was out wandering one day, and being fascinated by their delicacy and shape, and the luminous color woven throughout the shade of the trees.

The delightful flower below is a Bernadine Clematis, which made its first appearance here last year (see Clematis Variations: Gallery 1 of 2). One of the two plants I bought didn’t survive an unseasonable May 2019 heat wave; and the second while diminished in size quite a bit, sprang back enough to produce a small cluster of blooms. The first gallery below shows the blooms on the morning they opened, and the rest of the photos follow the blooms for a few days as they reached full size.

The previous posts in this series are:

Spring 2020: April Colors 5 (Clematis in Bloom, 1 of 3); and

Spring 2020: April Colors 4 (White, Orange, and Red-Red); and

Spring 2020: April Colors 3 (Purple and Yellow (and Yellow and Purple)); and

Spring 2020: April Colors 2 (Catawba Grapevine); and

Spring 2020: April Colors 1.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

What Remains: Clematis Transformations

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Clematis Season has pretty much come to an end here in Southeastern America; that is, the version of it that goes on in my back yard is almost over. I had written earlier about hoping to get another shot at taking some other shots of my President Clematis, since — when I wrote that post — there were a few unopened buds that looked like they would bloom up real nice. Unfortunately, however, we had several over-the-top hot-hot days in a row in April, and one afternoon when I wasn’t looking almost all of the buds … melted.

One did remain for a few days after the heat blast, so I got these three photos for a final presidential gallery … until next year:

The two Bernadine Clematis vines I added to my garden this year continued to bloom for a few weeks after the President dwindled. I had already taken quite a few photos of those blooms, so didn’t spend too much more time on that … except to assemble these three as a last look at Bernadine for 2019:

Every clematis bloom that appeared and drifted away since early April has been replaced by a tiny mophead. All of these seed pods — there are a dozen or more on each of the Bernadine vines — have a diameter about the size of a quarter or half-dollar, and they’ve already outlasted the flowers. The filaments are highly reflective, transitioning in color from silver to gold as the sun rises and moves to its noon-time high.

I took these photos the day after a couple of thunderstorms, which washed away most of the pollen that had collected on the filaments. My first attempt at a photo gallery — a few days before those storms — gave me a couple dozen photos so full of pollen dust that they weren’t usable. Normally I don’t mind spot-removing flaws and re-blending colors on my macro photos, but picking hundreds of pollen spots from these thin strands didn’t seem like a good way to spend my time. I deleted that first batch of images once I saw how much more photogenic they were after the rain.

Four of my clematis vines (all except the President) are in pots on my back steps, so I see clumps of these vibrant mopheads through my back door and every time I head into the garden. They make me smile quite a bit: they remind me of Truffula Trees from The Lorax by Dr. Seuss or the spiky clover from Horton Hears a Who. And yes, you guessed it: If I sit for a bit on the steps and lean in, I can just barely hear “We are here! We are here!” as the tiny residents of Whoville try to get my attention.

This may or may not be true. 🙂

Select the first image for a slideshow; thanks for reading and taking a look!