clematis on the web

Google is very clever, but sometimes doesn't pick up on sources it ought to, at least initially.  It is frighteningly quick at learning, though, once you show it what to do.  Last night I was looking on a nursery website at their selection of clematis.  I originally went to them because I wanted to buy a couple of their lupins, after admiring them at the Chelsea Show for several years running, but before spending seven pounds on delivery for just two plants, I thought I'd have a look at what else they did.  The list of clematis ran to a hundred and thirty five varieties, some of which I knew and some I didn't, and at seven pounds each were tempting.  True, they would be smaller plants than I used to buy from my former employer, but at half the price I wasn't sure that was a problem.  If something like a clematis is happy, it grows fast, and if it isn't, it dies anyway.  And many of them were varieties my old firm didn't even stock.

One of the beauties of the internet is the amount of information available on new and strange plants.  Yes, it is of variable quality, and you need to appraise the reliability of the source.  The University of Missouri Botanic Garden outranks an unknown blogger (including me, I suppose), and the views of anyone trying to sell you anything should always be taken with the appropriate dose of salt.  True, pictures are not always correctly labelled.  True, the University of Missouri is in north America and not the UK, and wonderful as their site is, their experience may not translate directly to north east Essex.  But used with an inkling of sense and scepticism, the net is a wonderful resource.

(One of the episodes that began to turn me off Gardeners' Question Time (though it was the clunking humour and a severe personal allergy to a couple of the panellists that finished me off) was when which every single team member dismissed computers as being of no use to gardeners, one suggesting jovially that the glass from the monitor screen might make a useful plant cover.  So you don't want to look up strange plants, bone up on unfamiliar diseases, browse nursery catalogues, check out gardens to visit, buy pruning saws for half the price your local garden centre wants to charge you for them and knapsack sprayers they don't stock at all, check the right time to take oregano cuttings, or learn anything about anything?  Fine.  I will listen to Mark Kermode's and Simon Mayo's film programme on Friday afternoons instead).

I digress.  To get a second opinion on the clematis, and fill in any details the vendor's account had left sketchy about tenderness, pruning regimes and so on, I Googled them in turn in a second window.  Some of the links thrown up on the first page were not terribly helpful.  The RHS came near the top of the list quite frequently, even though its website only gave a description or information on cultivation about half the time.  The rest of the time I was simply directed to a page that repeated the name, told me the family (ranunculaceae, but I knew that already) and gave a link to a list of suppliers.  Other first page links were to old newspaper articles that mentioned that variety somewhere in the middle of the piece, in between equally brief mentions of other plants I wasn't interested in.  Some were to vendors I wouldn't regard as expert.

Suddenly I remembered that a long time ago I bookmarked a superb site called Clematis on the web. It is a database which sets out, very systematically, information on over 3,500 different clematis. A description of the bloom, in many cases a photograph, details of how tall the plant grows, what aspect it requires, what pruning group it falls into, when it flowers, how large the flowers are and how many tepals they have, who bred it and when and in what country, its parentage if known, whether it is also sold under other names, and little snippets of information such as who it is named after.  There are links, where applicable, to articles by other vetted sites such as The International Clematis Society.  It is a marvellous, authoritative source, hosted by, of all organisations, the University of Hull.

I gave up Googling the varieties I was interested in, and just read about them on Clematis on the web.  And here's the clever, and slightly creepy, part.  Last night I was not getting links to them, or The International Clematis Society, coming up on the first page of search results.  When I had another quick look after lunch today, suddenly there they were near the top of the page.  Google, watching my every click, had worked out that I was more interested in them than in e-Bay vendors. Thus we shape our own world view.  It's innocuous enough, and even rather helpful, when it comes to advice on clematis varieties.  Scarier, perhaps, when it comes to hard news, as Google carefully feeds us results of the sort it knows that we like to see.