Re: clematis

In a message dated 5/16/02 8:45:44 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
Cersgarden@aol.com writes:

<<     Not to prune a clematis depends on the class.  A class 3 blooms on old 
 wood and a vine in this class would not be attractive if not pruned. >>

For everbody else in the Clematis world this is a skill, marking or learning 
the class.  For us here where the growing season is so short we have found 
that no pruning is the best.  You wait until spring and see how much of the 
plant is alive.  They bud out too early, often being frozen and then needing 
a new start so Mother Nature takes care of it.

The only happening that might be unattractive to a Clematis grower if the 
plant is unpruned is that if the vine lives over the winter, the flowering 
will tend to be at the top and there might be a bare part of the vine in the 
parts close to the ground.  If running the vine up a shrub, this does not 
matter, on an arch you might want to underplant it.

I have the Christopher Lloyd directive on Clematis pruning and realized one 
day that it does not apply to zone 4 gardens.  You get flowers whether you 
prune or do not prune though the rules are useful if you live somewhere that 
clematis will conform with the rules.

This year we have a Clematis montana about to bloom.  That would be one year 
in ten we will have flowers.  The vine lives over about 1/2 the time, never 
flowers.  When it freezes back to the ground, the roots live over.

On a trip to Rhode Island a few springs back, I saw Clematis montana with 
vines three inches thick at the base and flowers as they have in Europe.  In 
my early years on the mountain, I planted one and as I said, one flowering in 
ten years and if there is a nasty cold wind before it opens that may not 
happen.  

Not to be a such a complainer, a great many things burst into beautiful bloom 
following the advent of spring as well the great many that do not.  You can 
have a flowering shrub or tree here and find bloom every ten of fifteen years 
and it is such a surprise, one forgets why it was planted in the first place.

Claire Peplowski

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