Six on Saturday: a Mixed Year For Clematis

12.07.2024 - 16:05 / ramblinginthegarden.wordpress.com / Cathy

I have mentioned the performance of my clematis this year several times, and thought I would do a quick reccy of them today to substantiate my feeling that it is a poor year for them here. Not including those that didn’t perform at all last year (mostly herbaceous clematis in the middle of borders, which have unaccountably been reluctant to establish), there are 15 in flower, 17 not yet flowering (many a long way off doing so) and 5 no-shows. All those not yet flowering would usually have been blooming since mid-June or so, other than ‘Duchess of Albany’ and ‘Gravetye Beauty’, who don’t start till later (strange then that ‘Princess Diana’, also a C texensis, is one of the first Group 3 clematis to flower).

It is a relief that there were not as many no-shows as I thought there might be, but shows definitively that performance has been very much delayed this year, and it will be interesting to see how well the late-developers flower in due course – not as well as ‘Étôile Violette’ (above), I am sure, which is smothered every year in hundreds of purple blooms. Planted at the base of climbing rose ‘Madame Alfred Carriêre’, she takes her stars as far skyward as she possibly can. ‘Alionushka’ (below, a sudden breeze resulting in a largely out-of-focus shot) does try her best though, quickly reaching the top of her obelisk in on of the main borders before cascading downwards:

On the clematis colonnade, ‘Pernille’ and ‘Prince George’ have now been joined by ‘Madame Julia Correvan’, but there are still 4 posts with as yet non-blooming clematis.

Just sneaking into my Six on Saturday contribution for Jim’s meme at Garden Ruminations is ‘Blue Angel’, with her first bud of the year opening today. She climbs through climbing rose ‘Claire