Missed Deadline – Clematis

Like the cobbler’s children who didn’t have any shoes, my own garden is often neglected while I work on other people’s plants. The vine in question was planted by a previous resident. It could probably do with more sun, but it seems happy here and I am reluctant to move it, having lost other clematis’ (clematii?) in sunnier spots that should have been more ideal.

The best time to prune clematis is around the same time you prune the roses: when the forsythia is blooming. (The one exception to this would be any clematis that blooms in the spring.)

Before

After

As soon as you can see where healthy buds are, that is the time to prune, because the new buds are notoriously easy to knock off, if you wait until they start to send out shoots; nevertheless, that is when I finally got around to pruning this one.

 

Before, close-up

After, close-up

A few years ago I put four eyelet screws in the fence and wove picture wire through in a sort of butterfly shape, so that the clematis would have something to grow up.  Since the vine is still fairly small, pruning primarily consists of taking out the dead growth and ensuring the new growth is reaching the wires.

I think my favourite thing about this vine is that in late June it likes to peak through the fence to try and get the afternoon sun, and ends up creating a lovely semi-Zen minimalist look.

“Lavender’s blue . . .”

“Lavender’s blue, dilly-dilly, lavender’s green . . .”  Cute ditty, but I strongly suspect whoever wrote it was slightly colour-blind.  Lavender is not blue.  It’s . . . well . . . it’s lavender.  But perhaps I am being too prosaic, or literal, or something.

Lavender needs regular cutting back, because if you don’t, the base becomes all woody and gnarled and you can’t get any new growth from it.  The poor thing is endlessly reaching for the bright sunshine of Provence and not succeeding.

I know some people like to cut lavender back hard at the end of summer, but I generally give a light hair cut after bloom, and end up having sporadic bloom for the rest of the summer.  By fall I’m reluctant to cut back hard and encourage new, tender growth.  Also, with the unpredictable temperatures in winter, I prefer to leave all that excess growth as protection for the growth I’m going to cut back to in the spring.

Before

After

Case in point.  Here we are before and after with a small lavender.

It look drastic, I know, but it works.  I find the fastest way is to hold all the stems up and cut across, like doing a bad bowl cut on someones hair.  Then I fine tune.

The best time to do this is as soon as you can see where the new growth is, and therefore how far back it is safe to cut.  Generally a few weeks after I do the roses in spring I can see enough green to make the cuts, although some years I end up doing them at around the same time.  It is very tempting to cut out long leggy growths, but unless you see some green low down – don’t do it. If you miss this deadline, you can cut out deadwood in late spring (or even later), but you will miss the chance to cut back long leggy growths, as they will have lots of green on the ends just getting ready to bloom.

Dead, deceased, etc.

Of course, this year Mother Nature made the whole exercise a moot point by doing in all my lavender!  The bits of green showing through, are not lavender, but a rather aggressive aster cultivar.