Wednesday 24 September 2014

a happy accident

It has taken its time to get going, but now a pink clematis has come into flower below the rose bank.  The flowers are about an inch and a half across, with four faintly fleshy and slightly ruffled petals held well apart, and a neat central pale yellow boss.  The colour is a strongish mid pink, verging on cherry, paler on the reverse.  I had completely forgotten its name, though I remember buying it on impulse from the plant centre because I liked the colour and shape of the flowers, and the fact that the label said it would not grow too large, and could think where it would go. Looking it up now on my spreadsheet of things planted in the garden (a salutary experience after over twenty years, so many of them are no longer alive) I see that it is called 'Confetti'.

Googling it I see that it is classed as a viticella type.  Certainly it looks like one, with the smallish nodding bell shaped flowers and late season.  Viticellas are a useful class, coming towards the end of summer and in autumn when gardens can sometimes do with a boost, and while the individual flowers are not so showy as the large flowered hybrids, the plants are tough and good doers.  'Confetti' was bred by Raymond Evison, a great nurseryman specialising in the genus who has brought us a vast number of new varieties.  He shows them off each year at the Chelsea Flower Show, and some of them are saucer sized frillies I wouldn't attempt to grow myself.  They probably wouldn't survive in our less than ideal conditions, and they would look silly if they did.  But 'Confetti' is a charmer, a dainty and traditional shape and size, in a colour normally seen in large flowered cultivars.

It was supposed to be climbing up Daphne bholua 'Jacqueline Postill'.  I remember that part of the plan quite distinctly.  The daphne is a good seven feet tall by now, and not doing anything in particular in the back end of the summer.  I thought it wouldn't mind carrying a small passenger for those months, and that the little pink flowers would look pretty hanging down among the shiny but otherwise unexciting dark green daphne leaves.  One of the handy things about the viticellas is that you hard prune them in February, so a bird nest tangle of old shoots never the chance to develop.  Instead they flower on the current year's growth.  By February the daphne would be in flower, and I wouldn't want to risk pulling clematis stems out of it, but I couldn't see why I couldn't prune the clematis earlier, in about November, once it was dormant.

I had left one factor out of my calculations, which was the inevitable tendency of plants to grow towards the light.  Clematis 'Confetti' did not see why it should bother scaling the dark heights of the daphne, when it could ramble out over a small neighbouring shrub towards the sun.  By sheer good fortune, that neighbour happens to be Abelia schumannii, a slightly tender, semi evergreen shrub that also flowers in late summer and autumn.  Its small tubular flowers, held in little clusters, are a pinky purple which co-ordinates beautifully with the larger flowers of 'Confetti'.  Each abelia flower sits in a pinky brown calyx, giving the whole shrub a sort of warm glow, and it is a nice plant in any event, but the addition of the clematis flowers gives it a lift to a higher plane of gardening.

I wish I could take credit for the combination, but in truth it was a complete accident.

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