The season has turned. The Japanese anemone covering for a host of companions that have been and gone and will continue for the month of September and more. One of the most beautiful months of the year with its low golden light and the promise of pears and rosehips and the first autumn colour.
It is good to have plants that have their moment and mark the season, as cow parsley marks the turning point of spring to summer and now, here at Hillside, the wood asters light the paths and make up for a tired August. But the plants that you can depend upon to gently sail through are equally valuable for the bridge they make between seasons.
Clematis tangutica ‘My Angel’ has already been quietly flowering for several weeks and is set to continue well into the autumn. The growth is fine and delicate, but with a wiry resilience that belies first appearance and allows it to scale a wall in a season without you really noticing. The flowers are remarkable for their subtlety with dark buds of brownish purple and a constellation of successional flower. Red-purple to the reverse by the time the flowers split into four, the segments gently reflexing to reveal a lime-yellow interior and dark anthers. From above you have a completely different feeling, when looking down onto the mutable exteriors than when looking from below, up into an illuminated glowing interior.
You have to know about ‘My Angel’ if it is not to be overlooked in the height and riot of summer and I have placed it near the toolshed door, so we have to meet with it regularly on passing. You would not say the same of Clematis tangutica, its lemon-yellow parent, which can hold its own from a distance, but just now ‘My Angel’ marks the seasonal shift with a weighting of seedhead, which gather now in their silken numbers. This is when I love this plant the most, darkly hooded flowers suspended amongst the pale seedheads, which by October billow and pale still further like the old man’s beard in the hedgerows.
Until last year I grew ‘My Angel’ with a number of other clematis I am trialling in the stock beds for their suitability here. We do not have many walls that need clothing and, being a young garden, there are not that many shrubs or trees that are strong enough yet to send a clematis up into. You need to know about the vigour of a clematis before letting it loose in a companion and I am pleased I kept ‘My Angel’ for a wall, where all I have to watch out for is it not getting into the guttering. Its vigour is marked in a number of small plants that came from suckers that I must have left behind in the stock beds and are now rambling over the brassica nets where we have reclaimed the bed for vegetables. I will pot these up in spring and make gifts for friends or clients who might appreciate their demure but determined nature.
Clematis tangutica are not too choosy about their position, as long as it doesn’t bake or sit in perpetual shade and, as we are drenched in sun here, I have it on a west-facing wall for a cool morning and a light afternoon. Clematis like a cool root system, growing from shadow into light, so it sits behind the hamamelis, so that its roots stay shaded once the sun swings round in the afternoon.
When established the orange peel clematis are best pruned hard if they are not to form a bird’s nest at the top of their support. This is easily done in February, with shears to take off the volume of last year’s growth and then a refining cut to just above a bud and a series of primary limbs. I take my plant back to just above the point that it rises above the hamamelis, so that its new growth ascends into the light and up the wires on the wall and not into the witch hazel, which is better left free of its refined but assured company.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 31 August 2024