June Perennials

Joan Shaw

At last I'm able to write about this summer's garden, since I'm once again on line, with a new ISP, after being lost in cyberspace for two months. To say this was a first-class hassle is to put it mildly. But now it's over – I sincerely hope.

I took advantage of the lost time to photograph some plants newly acquired this spring, and some plants and bulbs that have been in the ground here for a couple of years which just started looking like they were holding their own. So I'm set for many pages to come. The roses were spectacular, but they're always spectacular, and I'll write about them in a later page. Right now, I'd like to talk about two June perennials that I truly appreciate -- feverfew and clematis.

Feverfew (Tanacetum parthenium) ~
Border with Feverfew5

These plants are what I love most about June – the billowing frothiness of feverfew (Tanacetum parthenium ) appearing in all the beds. The plant has a number of common names – featherfew, featherfoil, flirtwort, bachelor buttons. But feverfew itself is actually a corruption of febrifuge, which my online Oxford English Dictionary defines as a medicinal drink used to drive away fever. The dried leaves were steeped up until the end of the 1900s in a tea for the treatment of headache as well.

So where did all the feverfew on DragonGoose Farm come from? Well, years ago I sent for a collection of flower seeds called "Monet's Garden." In the flat box that I received through UPS were a number of round little boxes of seeds, segregated by color, and arranged to look like an artist's palette. The collection was said to be among those painted by Monet in his garden and included feverfew. The plants that resulted not only adapted happily to Northern Utah's climate, but spread throughout the beds here – not without my help in transplanting. It grows to about a foot and a half and is perfect for in front of a border. The stems, full of tiny white blossoms, make a wonderful and unusual filler for flower arrangements, too. In fact, I like it better for that purpose than baby's breath (Gypsophila), though I have baby's breath in the garden, too.

Feverfew is co

vered with many daisy-like flowers of yellow centers surrounded by thick fans of white petals. From a distance it gives an airy, cloud-like effect around the straighter and taller spears of iris, roses, fox glove, and lilies. Both plant and flowers have a bitter, chrysanthemum-type fragrance, and have a lovely mounding habit. (See photo above right.)

The plant is said to repel garden pests, and though feverfew does repel bees as well, it doesn't seem to keep them away from surrounding flowers. A massing of them in front of a planting of hollyhock mallow (Malva alcea) and the taller hollyhock (Alcea) is a pleasant sight spilling over a brick walk. A closeup of these tiny flowers is shown at left.

Clematis ~
Along the south orchard fence, I had at one time three fifteen-year-old clematis plants that climbed to the top of the orchard fence and were a spectacular sight in June. But to the horror of both our landscape manager and ourselves, the weeding crew grubbed out two of them thinking they were a tangle of bittersweet nightshade (Solanum dulcamara) and field bindweed (Convolvulus arvensis). The first clematis was irreparably gone,the second one was spared, and there was a ragged stem of the third one left. This stem I covered with a protective sleeve and offered up a little prayer for its survival. The first one I replaced two years ago with the red 'Niobe' clematis shown at the top of this page. It's grown well, already up four to five feet on the fence by late June, so I have high hopes of its topping out at the eight-foot level of the old Clematis (whose name has been lost in the mists of time). The ragged stem that I protected and prayed over managed to put out several new stems, a couple of which have themselves reached the top of the fence. We've removed two good-sized cedars just this week both to give the clematis more light and air and to guard against a problem with cedar apple rust on some of our apples.
Clematis on orchard fence

The old clematis can be seen in the photo to the right. A piece of the new growth of clematis can be seen far right in the photograph. The two cedars are, by this time, gone.

We have other varieties of clematis, newly planted in the last few years. They haven't bloomed much yet or at all in some cases. They haven't had much of a chance. As I mentioned in an earlier page, they kept being pulled up as weeds before they could defend themselves with a couple of blossoms to show they were actually valuable flowers.

I planted a 'Gravety Beauty' a couple of years ago in the prostrate cotoneaster in front of the house, thinking to have it scramble over that low shrub which spreads longways for about fifteen feet, but it finally succumbed to repeated grubbing-out by the weeders. The next one (C. 'purpura elegans') I planted as a climber rather than a scrambler, and protected it with a black-wire trunk protector. I noticed just now by its spent blooms that it had put out more than a dozen flowers, hidden among the prolific Austin climbing rose, 'Constance Spry'.

As far as clematis cultivation is concerned, water application to the roots is the most important. The entire plant can take full sun as long as its roots are kept moist. The large-flowered, early blooming type (the 15-year-old shown above right) flowers on growth made the previous year, so it needs no pruning, or pruning only to keep the plant from becoming rampant. The late-blooming types, on the other hand, should be pruned severely in early spring to encourage new growth. There is one disease mentioned – wilt – which I have never seen on the clematis on DragonGoose Farm. The cause is said to be acid soil and the soil in northern Utah is alkaline.

Besides the fifteen year old plants on the orchard fence, there is another I planted with a 'Leontyne Gervais' rambling rose. This clematis has stayed vigorous and healthy for over ten years (photo below left).

This is a pink variety for which, alas, I also have no name. It might well be the late-blooming, prune-in-the-spring variety, because the stems are a disaster after enduring a winter and need to be cut back along with the winter-killed rose canes. The plant comes through reliably, however, with masses of blooms and, indeed, blooms later than the old ones on the orchard fence.

Clematis as a flowering vine has been known since the time of the Greeks and was a wide-spread native vine in England (Clematis vitalba). North America has its own natives, C. crispa, with nodding flowers and a light scent, originating in the southeastern United States, and C. viorna, a freeflowering type with what is described as lovely, fluffy seedheads. All these species along with others have been used in breeding, including the European introduction during the reign of Elizabeth I, in 1569, C. viticella. This plant puts out blooms with a light scent derived from one of its parents, North America's own C. crispa.

All this ancient breeding history aside, intensive work on clematis didn't take off until the 19th century during which species and cultivars were introduced from all over the world, the more spectacular and large-flowered ones coming from Japan and China. One of the more famous and familiar to us here in the United States as well as in the UK is the dark violet-purple clematis, C. 'jackmanii'. It was bred by George Jackman and Sons and shown in 1863 in Kensington Gardens, England. It came in for much acclaim, receiving a Certificate of Merit in the First Class. This clematis, though followed by many other violet-purple varieties, has continued popular to this day and is still offered at nurseries and in catalogs.

A good-sized C. 'jackmanii' grows on the porch of an old house near here. I've watched it year after year as it emerges from the ground to over six feet on its porch post. This plant is a large flowered late bloomer that blooms on new growth from early summer on, and would be (and indeed is) pruned back severely each spring.

Since the nineteenth century, breeding of clematis with more and more outstanding introductions has increased exponentially. A visit to any nursery will find numberless varieties, depending on the size of the nursery, and plants can be found in almost all catalogs of garden plants.