Native Wisteria
For a few years now (hard to remember how many exactly, maybe 4-5) I’ve been growing this native wisteria in a container. It’s trained as a standard, though I have a few of the shoots pinned to the soil to propagate it. This beautiful vine lives in the unheated basement during the cold winter months, not because it can’t take the cold, but because the beautiful terracotta pot cannot.
This is a native wisteria (Wisteria frutescens) and much hardier than the Asian varieties (also much less aggressive). As a result, it blooms reliably in cold climates, no freezing of buds which happens quite often with the other varieties. My mom’s neighbor had a wisteria growing on her back porch, it only flowered about once every 5 years because the blooms would be frosted off in early spring.
What’s blooming in your garden this week?
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Parade of Early Summer Clematis
Recently, I’ve been trying to add more climbers to the garden, particularly clematises. They’re valuable for filling in trellises and under leggy bushes, they will scramble up roses and fill in small spots in borders. By the front door, I have a clematis (not blooming yet so not pictured) climbing up the bottom vine portion of the lonicera. The early clematises here in Maine start to bloom in late July, which isn’t really early by most garden standards, but our short season makes it so. Here are the early blooming clematises in my garden:
The beautiful purpler bell shaped clematis is ‘Betty Corning’, I purchased it from Hummingbird Farm last year at the Portland Flower Show. The burgundy one below is of an unkown variety to me, I purchased the root at a local discout store and it was simply labeled ‘Red Flowering Clematis’.
This large white beauty is called ‘Kotkas’ and I also purchased it from Hummingbird Farm last year at the Portland Flower Show. I’m actually thinking of moving the burgundy flowering clematis above to the trellis that is supporting the large white flowering clematis below. I think they’d look lovely intertwined on one trellis and fill it out nicely. I may even look for a slightly taller later flowering variety to cover the top of the trellis and bloom later in the summer. That’s one of the bauties of clematis, they can be layered into each other and other plants to extend the bloom season and add more interest.
I’d love to add more of these lovely vines to my collection and plan on taking a trip up to Hummingbird Farm (which is only about an hour and a half north). I’d love to get some anemone flowering vines and some more of the bell shaped ones.
Do you grow any clematis? What varieties do you have?
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End of June in the Garden
This has been a long spring, it seems to drag on and on, in fact last week we had nightime lows in the low 40’s. As a result, everything has been slow to arrive in the garden as well. The flowers are just starting to show their faces, it seems like July will be full since June and July will be compressed into one month.
These are a few of the things blooming in the garden right now.
What’s blooming in your garden?
