Of Rhubarb and Roses: the Telegraph Book of the Garden by Tim Richardson

Author:Tim Richardson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aurum
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Pity, I thought, that in our gardens, where the variety is so much greater, the lack of architecture prevents us from exploiting climbers more. These plants are without rivals for producing quantities of blossom and for wearing it elegantly. Pity, too, that this range of clematis offered us in garden centres should be so enticingly great now and the opportunities for growing them so slender in our gardens.

Perhaps we should revive the Edwardian garden cliché of the rose arch. Certainly when there is no more room for gardening laterally due to the over-planting that afflicts most keen gardeners’ plots all the vertical possibilities should be explored.

For several seasons now I have been meeting the problem by growing climbers on tripods made with 7ft. bamboo canes thrust into the ground and drawn together at the top. I prefer these to the square red cedar posts available in garden shops today as they quickly become less conspicuous. When the climbers reach the top, they either stop growing or hang down, which is an advantage in itself.

I find clematis, for one, take to this treatment very well, while occupying very little room, since the canes are put only a foot and a half apart at the bottom.

The new plantings consist of the winsome Clematis alpina, in its white and ruby forms, for the late spring, in company with some of the smaller flowered summer clematis whose nature it is to die away almost to the ground during the winter so that they grow up afresh each year. This should take care of the problem of sorting out whose shoots are whose.

But it is not only clematis by any means that lend themselves to this treatment. Take honeysuckle. This shares with ivy a tendency to become arborescent, as they say, when it has nothing more to cling to, making twiggy growth instead of reaching out further. Wisteria lends itself to close spurring like a cordon fruit tree, while the up-to-date varieties of climbing roses have none of that wild abandon of the Albertines of this world but ask for no more than a few canes for the main growths to be tied to.

Climbers trained in this fashion need not be in the open ground. This elementary bit of technique makes it possible for people with no more than little patios or even balconies to grow climbers in pots that need little lateral space, only about 6ft above them.

It is a very good way of growing morning glory, in particular, for with their roots restricted by the pot the plants have a greater inclination to flower than in the ground where they can feast on the fat of the land. The same goes for cobaea.

Passion flowers suffer from the same reluctance. If the plants are grown in a big pot they seem to realise that something awful could happen to them if they don’t open their flowers and get them fertilised to produce seed. It’s really like growing them on poor soil, where they are always so much better.

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