winter flowering clematis

Our Clematis cirrhosa var. balearica is in flower.  It looks a little underwhelmed by life, but is tentatively pushing out a few small, pale flowers as it scrambles among the Amelanchier and the Daphne below the rose bank.  I see from my records that it represents my third attempt to get a C. cirrhosa form going in that bed: I planted 'Freckles' in 2005 and C. balearica in 2007 and again in 2009.  The third and final planting date is still before the two unusually cold, long winters that we had, so although C. cirrhosa is not the most reliably cold hardy species it may not have been the cold that did for the first two.

Perhaps it was waterlogging.  After prolonged heavy rain various springs rise up in the bottom garden, including one at the base of the rose bank.  We lost a Japanese paper bush, Edgeworthia chrysantha, that way and I had to start again at the other end of the bed where it's drier.  Or maybe it was summer drought.  Or perhaps it was cold, less intense than the following two winters, but still too much for a newly planted specimen.  I see from my records that the first two were both planted in November, probably because that's when the plant centre got them in stock ahead of their winter flowering period.  The final and third time lucky plant didn't go out until March.  Or maybe weather had nothing to do with it, and the first two were eaten by slugs or voles.  That's the trouble with having a large, slapdash garden.  You look at part of it and realise something has failed, but you don't know exactly when or why.

I thought our third plant was going to join the first two specimens in the great compost heap in the sky and was all set to give up with Clematis cirrhosa this summer, when I saw its leaves had gone brown, but now I read on the Thorncroft Clematis website that they can have a natural dormant period in summer.  Ours has suffered as well a couple of times from being inadvertently pruned.  It is a lanky thing, disliking the spot where it is planted in the middle of the bed and growing some way upwards and south towards the light before consenting to put out any leaves.  It is very easy to snip the bare stems through by mistake when clearing out unwanted and too-rampant growths of honeysuckle from the rose bank, or tidying the hard-prune viticella type 'Confetti' that adorns Daphne bholua in late summer when it would not otherwise be doing anything interesting.  It is a deeply demoralising moment to realise you have just severed six feet of growth that you wanted to keep, but it happens and there is nothing to be done about it except try and be more careful next time.

In an ideal world you plant climbers together that have compatible pruning regimes, but there is a handy trick if you've got a clematis needing hard pruning growing through one that doesn't.  Find the roots of the plant to be pruned, work upwards from there and sever every stem close enough to the base that you can be certain you've got the plant you actually want to cut back.  Now go away and get on with something else until the leaves on the hard pruned plant have had time to wilt. Then you can see which stems to remove.  Of course this only works if you tackle the pruning before the leaves have all gone brown anyway.

What there is of C. cirrhosa var. balearica is quite pretty, with dainty, finely divided ferny green leaves and little pendant creamy flowers, though it would be better if there were rather more of it. I must feed and mulch it lavishly this spring and perhaps it will bush out.  I saw a splendid winter flowering clematis some years ago absolutely rampaging along a low wall at Hyde Hall, but they don't seem to like our garden so well.  One bashful specimen out of three attempts to grow it doesn't suggest I've found the ideal spot.