Carol Klein explains why our only native clematis has so much charisma
The UK's only native is a plant associated with both the devil and the Virgin Mary...
'It’s one of our regrets here that there are so few walls or fences for climbing plants, especially clematis'
My life has entailed lots of train journeys and motorway drives recently, filming for our new series of
Great British Gardens. The verges and embankments at this time of year tell a story of what’s just been and what's to come. Among the bare branches of trees and shrubs, a few have already burst into life. Banks of sloe blossom create cumulus clouds drifting along road edges, promising the beginning of spring, while in places the fluffy grey mist of old clematis seed heads drift through trees.
Anyone out for a country walk as autumn merges into winter is liable to come face to face with what is surely our most charismatic native climber. It has as many names as there are counties and the great majority of them celebrate not its flowers, but its seed heads.
Often known as old man’s beard, in fact one of its most common names is ‘travellers’ joy’, a reference to the way in which it scrambles and ambles through hedges, up trees and over banks, adorning its hosts with its lusty vines early in summer, green and vigorous and concentrating on expanding its empire, later opening its delicate cream-coloured blossom, and eventually adorned with characteristic fluffy seed heads.
At first these seed heads are silken and soft, reflecting light so they shine and shimmer; as they age they become fluffier, more anarchic and more visible as the leaves on the branches they adorn shrivel and fall. Clematis vitalba is our only native clematis. It’s steeped in lore, a plant both of the devil (‘old man’ is a pseudonym for the devil), for it’s powerful, strong and strangles without a second thought, and yet it’s deeply associated with the Virgin Mary. ‘Virgin’s bower’ or ‘lady’s bower’ are just a couple of its other names.
Few of us gardeners would incorporate C. vitalba unless we had plenty of room, or perhaps a native hedge to make it feel at home. In common with other members of the Ranunculaceae family, it has no petals. The sepals of its flowers form spherical buds protecting the boss of dainty stamens within until the right moment, then opening them in the late summer and early autumn sun, offering nectar to latecomers. It loves to have its thick, thonglike roots in the shade, preferably in alkaline soil, but with plenty of woodsy earth into which to delve, but it needs the warmth of direct sun to open its flowers.
It’s one of our regrets here that there are so few walls or fences for climbing plants, especially clematis, although visiting Richard Hodson and his wife Yvonne in their garden ‘Hawthornes’ near Ormskirk in Lancashire, who have one of the National Collections of clematis, taught me to use clematis imaginatively. He grows them through shrubs, up trees, obelisks and arches and in pots. There are no walls or fences in the garden, the usual sites for supporting clematis, but Richard demonstrates that they’re unnecessary.
One of the few sites where we have a thriving clematis is up our crab apple tree. Clematis ‘Huldine’ is a Viticella and makes rampant growth.
We cut it hard back at this time of year, training a few stems into the branches but pulling out most of last year’s growth. It always seems brutal but every year we have a splendid display of pearly-white flowers from July through to October, mingling then with the amber fruit of the crab apple ‘Golden Hornet’.