Piilu taken on a rainy day in May out my front window

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Etoile Violette and Betty Corning

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Juuli slightly past her prime

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side yard wall o'Clems

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Shot of Daniel Deronda from last year

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What a great report. The pictures really tell it all. I know the heartbreak of trying to grow clems in bad soil.

Katie

I feel your pain, BorS. I have Norway Maples in front, and the neighbour's Giant Pine, Norway Maple and Green Ash towering over one side of my backyard. I've had fantasies of somehow poisoning those trees in the night....if that makes me an evil person, oh well...
Anyway, a lot of your clematis look similar to some of mine, but at least mine are younger. It still scares me though, that maybe they won't have any more of a future than yours did. Thanks for posting,
Judith

Flowerfan on this forum has planted in similar situations but she was smart enough to use five gallon buckets with the bottoms cut out as root barriers to the trees. She has been very sucesssful according to her fabulous photographs.

I should have redid mine when I read about hers years ago....I thought I could get away with just hard pruning but clearly not...

Thank you so much for posting this. I have greatly benefited from your experience with hard pruning that you shared. I find it extremely helpful when people post about what works for them and what doesn't. I also have some clems that go gangbusters and others that languish, and now I'm going to have to think about root competition and the like, rather than just saying that they're bad or good varieties. (That hedge truly is a monster.)

I thought it was good or bad varieties until I gave some to my friend. I'd had Asao for five years and it was on the white trellis in back and just languished. I had Ville de Lyon for that long too.

I took the advice not to amend planting holes and not to prune Type I and II's to heart and it certainly didn't work for my garden.

Let me tell you about my experience this year. While I don't have a root competition problem I do have soil that no matter how much I amend it will revert to hard red clay over several years. Last year many of my 5-8 year old clems did poorly. During the winter (yes I can garden here during much of the winter) I dug down and around the sides of the root ball of each one (200 of them). I did not disturb in the middle or underneath the root ball. I replaced the bad soil with good amended soil (including chicken manure) and fed each one at the same time - it took me about 2 months. This spring my clematis exploded. The blooms were fantastic. I can lose 10-15 clems a year, this year I may have lost 1 or 2. The results are incredible. I believe I will be redoing the soil around each one every 1-2 years in the future.

Katie

Katie, how did you estimate exactly where the side of the root ball would be? I think if I attempted this that I would hack up the roots.

Thanks so much, buyorsell, for sharing your frustrations as well as your successes. I think it was only 3 years ago that I became clematis-crazed, and now that I have some experience, I'm seeing how much more experience I need! I'm having clems faint and disappear only to baffle me by popping back up with perky new growth a few weeks later; vines I thought were gone for good that had just snuck over into the midst of their neighbors and bloomed there; a viticella that should be all hardy and prolific turning out to have weak tangly stems and puny-looking flowers. I've planted them in the wrong place for their type, I've planted way too many too close together (still waiting for the dire consequences of that one, as they're young yet), I've planted very tall ones with not enough head room... and the list goes on. I had visions of solid walls of flowers, but so far most everyone (with a few happy exceptions) is looking kind of scraggly. But I still have hope! And I still love the little darlin's. Thanks for your advice. I see a whole lot more digging in my future.

This is nothing about wilting clematis, although I have plenty of them. I am attending the International Clematis Conference for a week starting Sept 6th and wondered what weather to expect if "buyorsell" from Portland would be so kind as to respond. "Joy Creek" is on our agenda of course. I am then touring down the coast for a week.

Normally it is dry and sunny that time of year. Rain is always possible especially on the Coast but dry and sunny would be normal even if there are morning clouds. 75-85* would be my guess in Portland and 10* cooler on the Coast.

To Redsox, when I dug around the clematis I did not disturb the roots. Just amending and replacing the soil around the sides and on top of the roots made a great difference.

Katie