The sheer tenacity of clematis

 

  

     Were I to ask you to start naming flowers — rose, daisy, daffodil, marigold — I believe that no matter how long you went on — zinnia, astor, petunia, iris — you would never get to clematis.
     Which is curious, because they're everywhere, especially now. An enormous bank of clematis is in front of a charming brick bungalow on the next block, putting off a sweet scent so intense that it presented itself while I was still across the street and several houses down.  An almost powdery floral smell, like sticking your face in a powder puff and breathing deeply.

      This is apparently typical.

     "Though well adapted for walls, trellises, pillars, and such like positions in the dressed garden, this plant is perhaps never more effective in pleasure-ground scenery than when planted on some rocky eminence," Thomas Moore and George Jackman write in the 1872, The Clemitas as a Garden Flower, "where, being allowed to assume a decumbent habit, its myriads of pure white blossoms seem to pour down the declivities like masses of drifting snow, at the same time embalming the air with their fragrance."

     There are some 380 species of clematis, some quite similar, but I'm going out on a limb and guess that these are Sweet Autumn Clematis, Clematis Paniculata J.F.Gmel.

     Maybe one reason clematis don't reside easily among the other flowers is because it's named, not for the delicate blooms, but for the plant below. "A genus of twining shrubs" is how the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, citing it as a direct borrowing from Latin, clematis, or "some kind of climbing or trailing plant, prob. periwinkle," and the Latin stemming directly from ancient Greek, κληματίς.

     Given the word's age, and the proliferation of the flower across the northern hemisphere, it's surprising how little the plant has twisted into our conscious. It's not a very literary flower (though there is a Victor Hugo clematis, with bold purple blossoms). Maybe because, unlike "rose," very little rhymes with "clematis." Bursitis? "Come fight us?" See the problem?

     Shakespeare doesn't mention clematis, though he does cite woodbine — with Oberon's "Quite over-canopied with luscious Woodbine" in "Midsummer Night's Dream" and some scholars think the term might have been referring to the wild clematis.

     There is a truly awful poem by Scottish poet Alexander Bathgate called "The Clematis" that punishes those who push through its far too numerous two dozen lines by calling the flower "Emblem of a perfect wife" whose work is unnoticed until it somehow benefits her husband and others remark on it. Ewww.

     Irish poet Eamon Grennan, who often cites flowers in his poetry and even wrote one poem about killing his houseplants, does a better job in "The Search," where he lauds the clematis for its perseverance, beginning: “It’s the sheer tenacity of the clematis clinging to/ rusty wire and chipped wood-fence that puts this/ sky-blue flare and purple fire in its petals."

     They do hang on. I've had some planted before my front porch, and they go up the trellis and over the rail forming an enormous mat that I finally cut away last year, discovering that my tolerance of the thing had caused significant portions of the wood underneath to rot. So no affection here. Though no hard feelings either. The clematis are quite pronounced on my front porch, though nowhere near as grand as the house above. Springtime gets all the good press, but autumn is not without its compensations.