Letter C The A to Z of TV Gardening

Hello and welcome to The A To Z Of TV Gardening.

Our first encounter is with a climber.

This C is for clematis, and here's Glenis Dyer, of the British Clematis Society.

There are at least 150, probably nearer 200,

different varieties of clematis in the garden.

You get very attached to them.

Or they get very attached to you, I'm not sure how I should put it.

But I do love them.

Each one that comes out is different, because actually

they're all your old friends and because we've got so many

in the garden, you've got something that comes out every month of the year.

But they're all so different.

You see the huge ones like dinner plates, but there are medium-sized ones,

and tiny, wee ones with little bells of about an inch or so long.

The ones which are easiest to grow are the herbaceous ones.

And the later-flowering ones, which is all the Viticella types,

the Texensis types, are very reliable and the later-flowering large, flowered hybrids.

These, along this section, are mainly herbaceous.

This particular one has a huge flower.

It was bred in Russia about 1970, I think.

And this one is called, Pamiat Serdtsa.

And it's just starting to flower.

It will go on, and on, and on, because the herbaceous ones do.

If you want to keep herbaceous clematis short,

or indeed any of the clematis short, you can chop them down.

We call it the Chelsea Chop, because you do it round about Chelsea week.

Reduce them by a couple of feet and that way,

you get twice as many flowers and they flower that little bit lower.

You can more or less control the height of your border.

I think most of the people who come round are quite surprised at the variety.

They see the large-flowered ones in the garden centres

and some of them probably have got them in their gardens,

but very often they haven't seen the tiny ones, the species.

These are the ones I love showing them because they need a wider audience.

Eric, we need some string over here to tie this one up.

OK, I'll be round.

Look at this.

'My husband Eric is maybe not

'so obsessive about the plants as I am, but he's so cooperative.'

He builds all these structures that they can ramble over.

He gives them their heads. He puts up ladders and supports for them.

We've got cones, all sorts of things in the garden.

This is an integrifolia that I grew from seed.

It's extremely vigorous. Huge, great leaves.

They're much bigger than a lot of the integrifolias

that you see but you can grow these so easily yourself from seed.

That'll do for now anyway.

Next year, taller support.

Some people call them clem-ATIS. Some people call them CLEM-atis.

In America, they call them cle-MATIS and in France,

they're called clematite.

It doesn't matter what you call them as long as you grow them.