It was a beautiful morning, sunny and bright, and I had the whole day to spend in the garden. I started off by weeding the gravel in the front. That is, weeding part of the gravel. There's a lot of it, and so keeping it free of weeds and leaf litter is an ongoing project. I decided to devote some time to the gravel, despite the borders crying out to be weeded and the seeds needing to be sown, because a mostly used bright green dumpy bag of gravel had been sitting near the entrance for weeks, and it seemed to me that using it up and getting rid of the bag offered a favourable ratio of effort to visible cosmetic improvement. There was no point in chucking perfectly good gravel on top of the weeds, hence the weeding. Although it was sunny, the wind was keen and made my eyes water, with the irritating result that I kept crying on my glasses. Once I'd cried on them I couldn't see properly, so kept having to stop weeding, take off my gloves, and rummage around under my fleece to find the hem of my cotton shirt to wipe them dry. This is why I have a pair of glasses specifically for gardening.
After I'd cleared the green bag out of the way I returned to the climbers under the veranda. I'm on the home straight (I tell myself), tackling a large honeysuckle that has grown up a huge elder. The honeysuckle was full of dead twigs, and as I cleared those out the underlying structure of twining stems revealed itself. I was able to tie quite a long section of honeysuckle and climbing rose into the trellis under the veranda, once I'd cleaned out all the debris. I'm cutting down the elder, but not until I have tidied the honeysuckle that's hanging from the top of it. That's a task that would be a hundred times more fiddly with the honeysuckle lying in a big collapsed heap around my knees. As I picked up years' worth of fallen twigs I uncovered a mysterious disc of something that looked vaguely unpleasant, and as if it might once have been alive. I wondered if the previous owners had ever had a tortoise, and if I had stumbled upon its shell, and then whether it was a gigantic hibernating toad. Investigating it cautiously I discovered it was an old birds' nest, that had fallen to the ground and started to solidify as it decomposed.
The Trachelospermum jasminoides does not look at all happy, which is a shame since it was starting to look quite good by the end of last summer. Its leaves have gone dull and hand down at the wrong angle. I blame the very cold snap, but maybe I have let it get dry. I put a can of water on it last week, just in case. The Berberidopsis corallina has lost a lot of leaves and the ends of its shoots have died in the cold, but it is throwing a new stem from ground level that looks healthy, and I think it is minded to live.
As I feared, those two nights when the temperature plummeted to around minus 12 C have hit several plants. The Pittosporum tenuifolium 'Wrinkled Blue' that had made good growth in its first season in the front garden has lost all the leaves from its upper branches. I thought they were doomed just after the frost, when they had gone the wrong colour. The branches at the very bottom of the bush look OK, so maybe it will sprout from the base. I'm starting to get chary about using pittosporums as structural features, pretty as they are. It is probably safer to regard them as ephemeral, charming while they last, but not to be depended on long term. Some people are like that.
The hyacinths in pots are opening. I tried a new (to me) variety, 'City of Bradford'. They are a soft blue, with a definite flush of pink while in bud, extremely attractive, and I'm delighted with them. Hyacinths are good bee plants, and today as well as the honeybees I saw a great queen bumble on one of the flowers. One stem had flopped over, and I took a couple of minutes to fetch a slim stake and some string and tie it up. It's worth making the effort, because hyacinth flowers last longer if not allowed to fall down.
Showing posts with label climbers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label climbers. Show all posts
Thursday, 8 March 2012
Tuesday, 28 February 2012
cutting back
The scene of my gardening operations has returned to the rose bed below the veranda. It is referred to as the near rose bed in my garden diary, and does contain quite a lot of roses, but some other things as well, including a clump of Paulownia tomentosa and a patch of Helianthus salicifolius. Both were included to add some height and some foliage interest to the roses, and are suckering with enthusiasm. The perennial sunflower makes tall, largely unbranching stems with narrow, willow-like leaves, which are quite intriguing. It has small yellow flowers in autumn, but they aren't really the point. There are a couple of rusted metal tripods with clematis up them, and an Eryngium pandanifolium bought at Great Dixter, which grew far larger than I ever envisaged before being cut down by the cold of last winter. That has since started making a good recovery, and I should really be brave and try and move some of its rosettes, since in the course of regenerating from the remains of the old clump it has migrated from its original position, which was already too close to a box hedge. There's an Astelia chatamica too, which made a fine specimen before being mostly destroyed by last winter's cold. It is regrowing from a couple of points, but doesn't look totally convinced about making the effort. And there's a dome of box, included to give some evergreen volume, and a narrow leaved bay, which keeps growing larger than I should really like it, and is a pig to prune, since it is on a slope and all hemmed in with roses.
The near rose bed loomed back into my consciousness because the Systems Administrator began to murmur that I really needed to finish cutting back the climbers on the veranda before the birds started nesting. They have to be cut back to give access for the SA to paint the barge boards and replace the gutter along the back of the house, and the desirability of finishing this job before the sailing and cricket seasons start has been looming in the SA's consciousness. They need tidying up anyway, as a great mass of dead twigs and branches has built up beneath the outer living layer. And when we're sitting in our steamer chairs on the veranda in the evenings, it would be nice to look out at the view, and not straight into the side of a mass of honeysuckle. I spotted one old birds' nest in the tangle, confirming that it has been used as a nesting site in the past, though it probably won't be so appealing once it's tidier.
I managed to neither stab myself on a thorn nor poke myself in the eye today, and as the afternoon wore on switched to hand weeding for the last part of the day. When I think about the times when I've scratched myself gardening badly enough to need a trip to the doctor, most of the accidents do seem to have occurred in the last couple of hours before the light goes. It could be coincidence, but I suspect that increasing tiredness and decreasing visibility have something to do with it.
I'm not even cutting back the climbers very hard, and it may be that when we try to get the scaffolding in, everything will have to suffer another, more severe chop. They are yielding up an extraordinary volume of debris as it is. The old lawn tractor, which is used minus its cutting deck to haul the garden trailer, disgraced itself yesterday by breaking down in a place where it was blocking the drive, and the trailer was hanging behind it on a slope. What should have been a ten minute job for the SA, emptying the trailer by the bonfire and putting it back by the veranda, took most of the afternoon, working out how to detach the trailer, pushing the tractor out of the way, and investigating the cause of the breakdown. That turned out to be the catastrophic failure of a component in the starter motor. A new part has been ordered (from Amazon. They sell everything) but in the meantime we are without the tractor. The current lawnmower will haul the trailer at a pinch, but as it is new, expensive, and not really up to the job, the SA is reluctant to use it for that purpose, and once I've filled the trailer again that may be my lot until the spare part arrives.
If I run out of space in the trailer then I will be free to return to my primary objective, which is to confine the yellow stemmed bamboo in the gunnera bed within the two rolls of galvanised lawn edging. It's got personal between me and that bamboo.
The near rose bed loomed back into my consciousness because the Systems Administrator began to murmur that I really needed to finish cutting back the climbers on the veranda before the birds started nesting. They have to be cut back to give access for the SA to paint the barge boards and replace the gutter along the back of the house, and the desirability of finishing this job before the sailing and cricket seasons start has been looming in the SA's consciousness. They need tidying up anyway, as a great mass of dead twigs and branches has built up beneath the outer living layer. And when we're sitting in our steamer chairs on the veranda in the evenings, it would be nice to look out at the view, and not straight into the side of a mass of honeysuckle. I spotted one old birds' nest in the tangle, confirming that it has been used as a nesting site in the past, though it probably won't be so appealing once it's tidier.
I managed to neither stab myself on a thorn nor poke myself in the eye today, and as the afternoon wore on switched to hand weeding for the last part of the day. When I think about the times when I've scratched myself gardening badly enough to need a trip to the doctor, most of the accidents do seem to have occurred in the last couple of hours before the light goes. It could be coincidence, but I suspect that increasing tiredness and decreasing visibility have something to do with it.
I'm not even cutting back the climbers very hard, and it may be that when we try to get the scaffolding in, everything will have to suffer another, more severe chop. They are yielding up an extraordinary volume of debris as it is. The old lawn tractor, which is used minus its cutting deck to haul the garden trailer, disgraced itself yesterday by breaking down in a place where it was blocking the drive, and the trailer was hanging behind it on a slope. What should have been a ten minute job for the SA, emptying the trailer by the bonfire and putting it back by the veranda, took most of the afternoon, working out how to detach the trailer, pushing the tractor out of the way, and investigating the cause of the breakdown. That turned out to be the catastrophic failure of a component in the starter motor. A new part has been ordered (from Amazon. They sell everything) but in the meantime we are without the tractor. The current lawnmower will haul the trailer at a pinch, but as it is new, expensive, and not really up to the job, the SA is reluctant to use it for that purpose, and once I've filled the trailer again that may be my lot until the spare part arrives.
If I run out of space in the trailer then I will be free to return to my primary objective, which is to confine the yellow stemmed bamboo in the gunnera bed within the two rolls of galvanised lawn edging. It's got personal between me and that bamboo.
Saturday, 21 January 2012
out with the old
I finished digging out the rhododendron stumps on Tuesday, but I didn't mention it at the time. I didn't feel like writing another blog post about stumps and witch hazel. Today it was the turn of the climbers on the veranda to start facing the chop.
There are at least two basic approaches to growing climbers up the side of a building. There is the RHS or National Trust house approach, where each branch is neatly tied in and pruned to within an inch of its life (nobody says 'within a centimetre of its life'. Makes you think English is still not metric at heart, even if we dutifully use metres and centimetres). The resulting wall shrub sticks out 30cm max from the face of the wall. Very tidy. Then there is the romantic profusion approach, where plants are tied to the wall and scramble into and over each other. Spasmodic efforts are made to remove forward facing growth, and the resulting tangle protrudes 1-2m from the supporting structure. Meanwhile birds nest in there, and it is all very naturalistic and charming. There are no prizes for guessing which category our garden falls into.
The jungle along the veranda has got to be reduced, so that we can get the scaffold in there to paint the barge boards and fit new guttering. And since there is a fair amount of dead wood mixed up among the live, it will look better for a good clean out. It is a complicated tangle. There are the remains of a Solanum crispum that was there when we bought the house. Most of it has died through old age, or the cold winters, or a combination of both. There is a climbing rose, also there when we moved in, which according to the label we found on it is 'New Dawn'. It has grown larger than some books say that 'New Dawn' would, but otherwise looks right. It is not so vigorous as it was, and could probably do with an intensive feeding regime to give it a boost. Also, I don't think it likes being overrun by the Clematic montana, another legacy of the previous owners (they had a Russian Vine as well, but I resorted to strong poison to get rid of that). There is a Clematis of the texensis type, yet another legacy, whose label I think said 'Duchess of Albany' I've added Trachelospermum jasminoides and Berberidopsis corallina, both refugees from the conservatory. Neither have formed much of a tangle yet, but the Trachelospermum looks happier about life than it did under glass. There is an inherited honeysuckle, species unknown, and I tucked in a Jasminum beesianum, which has finally grasped the idea that it is supposed to climb and not run about over the ground.
I thought I'd better start on this job fairly soon, partly because February is the target month for the last of the exterior decorating, and partly because I don't want to leave it until spring and then find birds nesting in there. I began by burrowing inside the mess, to cut and pull out any dead rose branches, bits of decayed Solanum, and so on. There was a fair amount. Then I cut down a large elder sapling that had seeded itself a pace out from the line of the trellis. This was performing a quasi-useful function acting as a prop for the climbers, but couldn't stay there given the need to get the scaffold in. Removing it had the predictable effect of causing a mass of Clematis montana to collapse on my head. Having cleaned what dead stuff I could from the inside, which reduced the bulk, I'm now working along the outside, cutting growth back and tying it in.
The Clematis montana is reluctant to grow along the bottom of the veranda, and keeps flopping forward and trying to set off across the rose bed. Clematis climbs by winding its leaf stalks around anything it touches, mainly other Clematis stems, and separating the branches enough to haul them back up to the top of the trellis means cutting through dozens of dry and tightly twisted leaf stalks. This is slow and fiddly, and there would be a quicker and more brutal way, which would be to reduce everything, accepting that there won't be any flowers this year, and assuming that all will grow back. I don't want to do that, as I would rather have some flowers this year than not, and I'm not keen on the scorched earth look. Some might see it as a symbol of humanity successfully subjugating nature, but I prefer to hang on to a bit of unsubjugated nature, wherever possible.
Last night I started a similar job on my desk, and finally cleared the last data off my old laptop. I got my current laptop last spring, when my previous one (an ancient hand-me-down from the Systems Administrator, but it worked well for years) and my moderately aged desktop both showed signs of becoming alarmingly unstable. I transferred essential files at once, and started scrubbing things I didn't really need to keep, but never completed the task. Since April of last year I've had two geriatric computers sitting on my desk, taking up so much room that I had to retreat to the kitchen, when I wanted to type and refer to a reference book at the same time. Before I resumed the clearance, the Systems Administrator disabled the laptop's connection to the net, so that it couldn't try and start collecting nine months worth of downloads.
It is rather poignant clearing an old laptop. All those letters relating to woodland talks going back to 2006. I don't need them. The talks are done and dusted, the donations handed over to the charity. I don't need a record of how many people were in the audience and which group asked the question about UK versus European provenance for tree seeds, in the light of climate change. And yet it is a little archive of my life. I chucked it out. I won't throw the computer away, even now, just in case. It will go and gather dust in the spare room for another decade or two. The last stage of the project will be to fire up the desktop and do the same final clear-out from that. And then I shall have so much space on my desk, I won't know what to do with it.
There are at least two basic approaches to growing climbers up the side of a building. There is the RHS or National Trust house approach, where each branch is neatly tied in and pruned to within an inch of its life (nobody says 'within a centimetre of its life'. Makes you think English is still not metric at heart, even if we dutifully use metres and centimetres). The resulting wall shrub sticks out 30cm max from the face of the wall. Very tidy. Then there is the romantic profusion approach, where plants are tied to the wall and scramble into and over each other. Spasmodic efforts are made to remove forward facing growth, and the resulting tangle protrudes 1-2m from the supporting structure. Meanwhile birds nest in there, and it is all very naturalistic and charming. There are no prizes for guessing which category our garden falls into.
The jungle along the veranda has got to be reduced, so that we can get the scaffold in there to paint the barge boards and fit new guttering. And since there is a fair amount of dead wood mixed up among the live, it will look better for a good clean out. It is a complicated tangle. There are the remains of a Solanum crispum that was there when we bought the house. Most of it has died through old age, or the cold winters, or a combination of both. There is a climbing rose, also there when we moved in, which according to the label we found on it is 'New Dawn'. It has grown larger than some books say that 'New Dawn' would, but otherwise looks right. It is not so vigorous as it was, and could probably do with an intensive feeding regime to give it a boost. Also, I don't think it likes being overrun by the Clematic montana, another legacy of the previous owners (they had a Russian Vine as well, but I resorted to strong poison to get rid of that). There is a Clematis of the texensis type, yet another legacy, whose label I think said 'Duchess of Albany' I've added Trachelospermum jasminoides and Berberidopsis corallina, both refugees from the conservatory. Neither have formed much of a tangle yet, but the Trachelospermum looks happier about life than it did under glass. There is an inherited honeysuckle, species unknown, and I tucked in a Jasminum beesianum, which has finally grasped the idea that it is supposed to climb and not run about over the ground.
I thought I'd better start on this job fairly soon, partly because February is the target month for the last of the exterior decorating, and partly because I don't want to leave it until spring and then find birds nesting in there. I began by burrowing inside the mess, to cut and pull out any dead rose branches, bits of decayed Solanum, and so on. There was a fair amount. Then I cut down a large elder sapling that had seeded itself a pace out from the line of the trellis. This was performing a quasi-useful function acting as a prop for the climbers, but couldn't stay there given the need to get the scaffold in. Removing it had the predictable effect of causing a mass of Clematis montana to collapse on my head. Having cleaned what dead stuff I could from the inside, which reduced the bulk, I'm now working along the outside, cutting growth back and tying it in.
The Clematis montana is reluctant to grow along the bottom of the veranda, and keeps flopping forward and trying to set off across the rose bed. Clematis climbs by winding its leaf stalks around anything it touches, mainly other Clematis stems, and separating the branches enough to haul them back up to the top of the trellis means cutting through dozens of dry and tightly twisted leaf stalks. This is slow and fiddly, and there would be a quicker and more brutal way, which would be to reduce everything, accepting that there won't be any flowers this year, and assuming that all will grow back. I don't want to do that, as I would rather have some flowers this year than not, and I'm not keen on the scorched earth look. Some might see it as a symbol of humanity successfully subjugating nature, but I prefer to hang on to a bit of unsubjugated nature, wherever possible.
Last night I started a similar job on my desk, and finally cleared the last data off my old laptop. I got my current laptop last spring, when my previous one (an ancient hand-me-down from the Systems Administrator, but it worked well for years) and my moderately aged desktop both showed signs of becoming alarmingly unstable. I transferred essential files at once, and started scrubbing things I didn't really need to keep, but never completed the task. Since April of last year I've had two geriatric computers sitting on my desk, taking up so much room that I had to retreat to the kitchen, when I wanted to type and refer to a reference book at the same time. Before I resumed the clearance, the Systems Administrator disabled the laptop's connection to the net, so that it couldn't try and start collecting nine months worth of downloads.
It is rather poignant clearing an old laptop. All those letters relating to woodland talks going back to 2006. I don't need them. The talks are done and dusted, the donations handed over to the charity. I don't need a record of how many people were in the audience and which group asked the question about UK versus European provenance for tree seeds, in the light of climate change. And yet it is a little archive of my life. I chucked it out. I won't throw the computer away, even now, just in case. It will go and gather dust in the spare room for another decade or two. The last stage of the project will be to fire up the desktop and do the same final clear-out from that. And then I shall have so much space on my desk, I won't know what to do with it.
Wednesday, 13 April 2011
pondlife, and coastal climbers revisited
Looking into the formal pond in front of the house, I've seen newts. The pond is slightly failing in its role as an ornamental feature, as a carex that formed part of the original planting has seeded into all the other containers and largely overwhelmed the rest of the marginal plants, while the water surface is a mess of duckweed, and the body of the pond choked by the submerged oxygenators that have multiplied wildly. As a wildlife feature it's doing a great job. The actual water is limpid, crystal clear, and full of life. The newts have grown crests for the breeding season, but since they are very small, and when I see them the rest of the time they are crestless and the usual common newt brown and orange, I'm sure they are common ones and not great crested (if I thought there was any danger we had great crested newts in the front garden I would keep very quiet about it). The newts swim about the edges of the pond, tiny toes outstretched. When I disturb them around the garden while weeding at other times of the year they sham dead, to deter me from eating them. The first time one did this I thought I must have somehow killed it, but have since discovered that this is normal newt behaviour. As well as the newts I saw a couple of what looked like small flint cylinders, with tufts of weed growing on them, bumbling about, and I presume these were the larvae of some insect. I need to clear the pond out at some point, but this is definitely not the right time.
I found a toad as well yesterday, while I was weeding in the back garden. I picked it up carefully and put it in the middle of a Podocarpus where it wouldn't get disturbed again. Toads have a very poor sense of self-preservation. If uncovered by somebody weeding then instead of shuffling off as fast as they can crawl to put distance between themselves and the potential danger, they move about a trowel's length and stop as soon as they are hidden from view, so in a few minutes they get dug up again.
I find the presence of amphibians reassuring, apart from the fact that I like toads, as it makes me feel that the garden must be reasonably healthy and unpolluted. We very rarely get frogs, but I have been told that they tend not to co-exist with toads. I don't know why not.
Fired up by the question about climbing plants for a windy garden right by the sea, I re-read one of my few books about coastal gardening, Gardening at the Shore by Frances Tennenbaum, published by Timber Press. They are north American publishers, and she is an American author whose examples are all drawn from north America, so it requires a little intelligent thought to extrapolate her views to gardening in Felixstowe, but many of the points she makes are just as applicable this side of the Atlantic. Neither the text nor illustrations make much mention of climbing plants. As is often the way with this sort of book, there is a final section on suitable plants for the matter in hand, and the section on Vines only names two. One is Carolina jasmine or Gelsemium sempervirens, which sounds very useful, apart from the fact that I can't recall ever seeing for sale here. The other is Parthenocissus quinquefolia, Virginia creeper. I'd never thought of that as specifically good for coastal conditions, but she says it will grow on dry dunes and even the ocean shore. In the body of the text in the earlier chapters she suggests that it is worth experimenting with roses, if they are given a modicum of shelter.
I checked the list of shrubs and climbers for specific purposes in the back of Graham Stuart Thomas's excellent Ornamental shrubs, climbers and bamboos, but the only climber included among shrubs for exposed gardens at the seaside was Muehlenbeckia complexa. Then I tried the RHS on-line plant selector, going for climbers for a coastal position, and leaving all other conditions such as soil type and flower colour entirely open. This came up with a list of 24 names, including quite a lot of different honeysuckles, common jasmine, wisteria, a few rose varieties, plus, rather bizarrely, one Raymond Evison clematis, the variety 'Rosemoor'. I can't believe that 'Rosemoor' is so uniquely gifted among all other clematis varieties as to wind and salt tolerance, but there it is. The RHS doesn't mention muehlenbeckia. Maybe they don't count it as a climber.
After my quest for knowledge I felt that on the whole gardening experts didn't associate climbing plants with coastal gardening any more than I did. I don't think this is just down to habit, prejudice or fashion. Leaving aside other parts of the world with very humid climates where forests grow close to the sea, coastal vegetation around the UK and northern Europe tends to be low-growing, due to the blasting effect of salt laden winds. The reason why plants evolve a climbing habit is to hoist themselves up to the light, whether by mountaineering up other, taller plants, or by scrambling up rock faces. If you come from coastal conditions where there aren't other tall plants to block the light, and the general name of the game is to hunker down low out of the worst of the salt wind, you don't need to climb. That's not to say that some climbers from inland areas won't turn out to be salt-tolerant, but there's no reason to expect that many will be. UK gardens close to the sea that do manage to grow tall plants inevitably make use of extensive shelter-belt plantings, to cut down the effect of wind and salt within the garden, and in the case of the great Cornish gardens are often tucked into valleys that give additional protection. The wonderful garden made by Derek Jarman at Dungeness, which was an immediate response to the shingle and the sea, with no shelter belt, did not use climbing plants.
So I'm afraid the pleasant couple from Felixstowe, with their series of big arches that they want to cover with flowering climbers, have set themselves a difficult challenge. If they had been designing the garden with respect to its surroundings and the wider landscape maybe they shouldn't have had big arches. Or if they want pergolas covered in flowering climbers maybe they shouldn't have chosen to live right by the sea. But I will try to get down to the sea-front gardens at Clacton at some point this summer, and see what's growing on the pergola there, and how it's doing.
I found a toad as well yesterday, while I was weeding in the back garden. I picked it up carefully and put it in the middle of a Podocarpus where it wouldn't get disturbed again. Toads have a very poor sense of self-preservation. If uncovered by somebody weeding then instead of shuffling off as fast as they can crawl to put distance between themselves and the potential danger, they move about a trowel's length and stop as soon as they are hidden from view, so in a few minutes they get dug up again.
I find the presence of amphibians reassuring, apart from the fact that I like toads, as it makes me feel that the garden must be reasonably healthy and unpolluted. We very rarely get frogs, but I have been told that they tend not to co-exist with toads. I don't know why not.
Fired up by the question about climbing plants for a windy garden right by the sea, I re-read one of my few books about coastal gardening, Gardening at the Shore by Frances Tennenbaum, published by Timber Press. They are north American publishers, and she is an American author whose examples are all drawn from north America, so it requires a little intelligent thought to extrapolate her views to gardening in Felixstowe, but many of the points she makes are just as applicable this side of the Atlantic. Neither the text nor illustrations make much mention of climbing plants. As is often the way with this sort of book, there is a final section on suitable plants for the matter in hand, and the section on Vines only names two. One is Carolina jasmine or Gelsemium sempervirens, which sounds very useful, apart from the fact that I can't recall ever seeing for sale here. The other is Parthenocissus quinquefolia, Virginia creeper. I'd never thought of that as specifically good for coastal conditions, but she says it will grow on dry dunes and even the ocean shore. In the body of the text in the earlier chapters she suggests that it is worth experimenting with roses, if they are given a modicum of shelter.
I checked the list of shrubs and climbers for specific purposes in the back of Graham Stuart Thomas's excellent Ornamental shrubs, climbers and bamboos, but the only climber included among shrubs for exposed gardens at the seaside was Muehlenbeckia complexa. Then I tried the RHS on-line plant selector, going for climbers for a coastal position, and leaving all other conditions such as soil type and flower colour entirely open. This came up with a list of 24 names, including quite a lot of different honeysuckles, common jasmine, wisteria, a few rose varieties, plus, rather bizarrely, one Raymond Evison clematis, the variety 'Rosemoor'. I can't believe that 'Rosemoor' is so uniquely gifted among all other clematis varieties as to wind and salt tolerance, but there it is. The RHS doesn't mention muehlenbeckia. Maybe they don't count it as a climber.
After my quest for knowledge I felt that on the whole gardening experts didn't associate climbing plants with coastal gardening any more than I did. I don't think this is just down to habit, prejudice or fashion. Leaving aside other parts of the world with very humid climates where forests grow close to the sea, coastal vegetation around the UK and northern Europe tends to be low-growing, due to the blasting effect of salt laden winds. The reason why plants evolve a climbing habit is to hoist themselves up to the light, whether by mountaineering up other, taller plants, or by scrambling up rock faces. If you come from coastal conditions where there aren't other tall plants to block the light, and the general name of the game is to hunker down low out of the worst of the salt wind, you don't need to climb. That's not to say that some climbers from inland areas won't turn out to be salt-tolerant, but there's no reason to expect that many will be. UK gardens close to the sea that do manage to grow tall plants inevitably make use of extensive shelter-belt plantings, to cut down the effect of wind and salt within the garden, and in the case of the great Cornish gardens are often tucked into valleys that give additional protection. The wonderful garden made by Derek Jarman at Dungeness, which was an immediate response to the shingle and the sea, with no shelter belt, did not use climbing plants.
So I'm afraid the pleasant couple from Felixstowe, with their series of big arches that they want to cover with flowering climbers, have set themselves a difficult challenge. If they had been designing the garden with respect to its surroundings and the wider landscape maybe they shouldn't have had big arches. Or if they want pergolas covered in flowering climbers maybe they shouldn't have chosen to live right by the sea. But I will try to get down to the sea-front gardens at Clacton at some point this summer, and see what's growing on the pergola there, and how it's doing.
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