JULY/AUGUST 2007

One evening I was sitting around the table with a group of garden writers when someone proposed that we each recount our most embarrassing moment in print. I described the time I had written a newspaper column about the houseplant Cape primrose (Streptocarpus), and a headline writer referred to the hardy spring-blooming primrose or Primula, thus making me look ignorant, as if I didn’t know the difference between the two plants. That was the week I hoped I had no readers.

Last summer I was embarrassed again; only this time I did it to myself. I had been wanting to grow the hardy tall Clematis texensis ‘Duchess of Albany’ ever since I first saw it blooming one August day in Minnesota, decked out head to toe with smallish pendulous pink bells. It seemed a great plant for assuaging those end-of-summer doldrums when I crave the sight of something new. After finally figuring out where I could plant it, I ordered one from Klehm’s Song Sparrow Nursery a couple years ago and put it at the base of a very old mock orange, hoping it would scramble up the 8-foot tall branches all the way to the top.

The plant survived its first Chicago winter in fine fettle, so last summer found me doing the full Mother Hen bit—watering, mulching, scrutinizing the stems as they meandered upward. I fervently hoped for bloom before frost.

I’m not sure what happened next, but time passed, and then one day I happened to pause alongside the mock orange, look up, and find myself gazing at a host of curly silvery seed pods. I stared, stupefied, as it gradually dawned on me that the clematis had already finished blooming and I hadn’t seen a single flower.

How could this have happened? And to me, a mad keen gardener! Had I been too busy to really see the life around me? Was this a message from the universe?

This past spring, still mortified every time I recalled my gaffe, I kept a watchful eye on that spot under the mock orange, particularly since those April storms had been so damaging. I was relieved when the first shoots of ‘Duchess of Albany’ emerged, followed by all my other clematis—the pink ‘Hagley Hybrid’ that grows up a white wood fence, the ‘cranberry ‘Niobe’, the white ‘Hyde Hall’ and the dark purple ‘Jackmanii’ that climb up roses. What a great group of plants, I thought. Why don’t we see more clematis in Chicagoland?

Finally, I went rummaging under some heavy leaf mulch and found the shoots of Clematis tangutica, an autumn-blooming species that grows 15 feet tall and covers itself with yellow bell-like flowers. A purchase last May from Anton’s Greenhouse in Evanston, it’s a prized possession that I hope to see in bloom this year. The odds are good. It’s planted by my front gate where even I can’t miss it.