some favorite clematis

I’ve mentioned my penchant for growing vines up and over otherwise-dull shrubbery, and in doing so not long ago I guess I got to realizing I was barely making use of a fraction of the opportunities.

An accidental favorite of mine is ‘Duchess of Albany’ (above, and detail, bottom) a Victorian era hybrid of C. texensis. I say accidental because I thought I was buying its cousin, another texensis type with much deeper-colored flowers called ‘Gravetye Beauty,’ named at the turn of the 20th Century for the home of William Robinson, the great English garden writer. But when she bloomed…the beauty was a duchess, and I didn’t have the heart to toss her majesty in the heap. With the help of a big spiral of jute twine, she cloaks a post on my back porch.

I purchased the C. viticella hybrid called ‘Polish Spirit’ (top) because of its name, frankly, as did Martha Stewart when we both first heard of the cultivar. ‘Polish Spirit’ wasn’t named for Martha, but certainly could have been. It was introduced a full century later than ‘Gravetye Beauty’ or ‘Duchess of Albany,’ in 1984. If you can’t find it, its cousin ‘Etoile Violette’ is another 3-inch, rich-purple possibility….and come to think of it, it’s around here somewhere, too. Yikes: It was climbing in the big bottlebrush buckeye that a storm took down last week, so I’ll have to go rescue it.