Growing Clematis in Pots

welcome once again to adswood my name's Ken black and in this video I'm going to show you how I grow clematis in pots I'll start by taking you around the garden to see some of the pots in in situ and explain why they are there and what technique I've used and then we'll go down the garden and I'll show you in more detailed how I use pots and how I plant clematis up hope you enjoy it here are the clematis that provided collagen in the spring they're all they've all finished flowering now some have nice seed heads on them and they will stay down here I might get a few more flowers next month um atrogines do that but basically they're finished for the year and they'll continue to grow down here in the winter I may need to repot some because they've outgrown their pots but most of them will be all right for next year on the other side of the greenhouse I have the clematis that are yet to flower some of the early ones here there's a Montana there that's waiting to be put in and these ones are well mainly later flowering ones some are viticellas and as you see putting on quite a lot of height the other thing you'll notice about these is that they are all grown in plastic pots these are the ones that I either put on the patio or hide in the herbaceous borders so that you don't see the pot but the majority of for the patio where I will put the plastic pot inside a ceramic pot to make it look better these clematers when they're in flour and some have really large butts look spectacular and so I think the the patio is a good place for them but when they finish flowering and also in the winter when they haven't got any Leaf they look very boring and some of them quite frankly look dead so you wouldn't want them on the patio you wouldn't want to be looking out on a Winter's day at a lot of dead Twigs which you would be so that's why I grow these in in pots that can be placed out when they're in flour and taken back down here when they're not in flour this is our patio the step outside the French windows that we had put in well the sliding I suppose the technically not French windows but you know what I mean so that we can look out on the garden from inside all year round it gets the sun in the morning but for the majority of the day it's in partial shade or shade this is Julian blade she's been in flower for three to four weeks now and this is not what you think it might be this is one called Tudor but like all stripy plants it prefers to have some shade because the sun makes the flowers fade and I can see that the flowers on on here have faded even just having the morning sun moving along we come to Gladys Pickard another beautiful white one Gladys is starting to drop the sepals now and in the weakest host time she will have finished flowering and new to the patio just coming to the fall is Nubia that's a beautiful velvet I don't know whether you would call it red or Crimson but it's fantastic and as Gladys Pickard Fades and Tudor is nearly finished they will be replaced of course I don't have to replace them with clematis because the in a pot within a pot and you can see the ceramic pot and the plastic pot inside I could easily put some pansies in one of those plastic pots and drop it in the ceramic pot or any other plant that I think would look good I have other clematis in pots that are ceramic pots and plastic pots that are not there for display purposes on the patio for example as you can tell from this footage the the ground here is very Stoney it's covered in in Pebbles and I couldn't possibly get a spade or a fork in there it's next to the storm water drain and is next to where we keep our our bins so this ceramic pot I took the bottom out of and planted a spring flowering clematis making sure that the compost I put it in was very free draining 50 percent grit 50 compost and it's been here for a number of years now the advantage of using a pot without a bottom is that the clematis can be fed the crown can be kept reasonably dry because it's above ground level but the feeding and watering routes can go down and can go down quite frankly in places where I I couldn't get a fork or a trowel so the roots will be well and truly underneath all the concrete here and will be cool and getting the benefit of that whereas the pot will be regularly fed with the slow release fertilizer that I've used I wouldn't be able to grow anything here had I not used a bottomless pot I'm now by the raised Pond some of you may remember from previous videos a white Montana Grandy Flora on this fence well unfortunately the fence post gave way so at the end of last year we had to have the fence replaced and my neighbor said she Preferred Concrete posts not ones that I'm particularly fond of but we agreed to go right down the garden with them certainly the fence will outlive me but to grow things against it because the ground again behind this Pond is so uncompromisingly hard I've used a series of bottomless plastic pots they're more like the sort of trugs you'd buy in a garden center when you wanted to weed but these are these are very big they're sort of 25 liter pots at least and this one has honeysuckle in it the next one has a rose and further down a spring flowering clematis that is looking very happy in there it's been in there since December and I've continued down the fence where the soil has been very hard or where we've had an armored electric cable underneath to use a pot to plant the clematis in so that again they can get their Roots down where they need to and where I probably wouldn't be able to get to very easily if I swing the camera around now you'll be able to see Broughton star above this window it's not enough above the window it's decided to grow down over the window more than anything else and it's with another Montana urges Croft and if I go down to the bottom of her just Croft you'll see it too is in a plastic pot not a very big looking one but with no bottom in it the roots are going right under the patio here the crown has been kept dry and if I swing around to the roots of Broughton star that's exactly the same a bottomless pot now these are the only two clematis Montanas that survived the winter the other ones that I have planted in the ground that have been there for over 20 years didn't manage because of the different climate climates we had and changes in temperature and conditions from last summer through to the end of spring so this is a testament to the benefit of using a pot and allowing a clematist to have the best of both worlds or just pan up again because it's it's too good to ignore fabulous show of color now here are two more clematis just off the patio you can't see them from inside all that clearly so I I don't mind having them in permanent pots this one hasn't been a great success this is a spring one and this is a summer one this is Samaritan Joe which has been in this ceramic pot for nearly five years now and probably this winter I should knock it out of the pot and renew the compost and repot it well I'm saying that this one the spring one is not a great success um I'm starting to use it as a host for a later flowering clematis which is in a um a plastic pot within a plastic pot and this is so that it can grow and use this and come into flour this one is texansis grave tie Beauty it flowers later than some of the other Tech senses so by then it would probably be well integrated with this spring one and I'll have to prune it out at the end of the year Down The Colonnade you'll be able to see a blue pot with another clematis this is Nelly Mosa and I haven't positioned this properly this is getting more Sun than I thought it would so once more the flowers are fading and when that's finished flowering I will endeavor to move the pot probably with some help because it's a very heavy pot and move it more into the shade or dappled sunlight got our new summer house we had a swing seat here which rotted so we decided to put up a different structure and this provides a lovely place to sit late in the afternoon and has been known to play house to um the odd glass of wine after six o'clock in the evening but here we've got a pot of pansies and the pansies are in a black plastic pot with an outer pot the outer pot is is plastic but it doesn't look too bad similarly on the other side we've got an Acer which is planted in a plastic pot but looks good in that blue ceramic pot and this is a another plastic pot a bigger plastic pot with three Bijou clematists in three of Raymond everson's collections then I bought this year so I'll put a wigwam of canes up that and see what they look like they are three different clematists so I'm just experimenting to see what they look like together over the other side of the garden I've got a large ceramic pot in which Princess Kate is growing Princess Kate is the pot is fairly sheltered from the Sun here I'll move around the other side sorry about the jerky camera work um there's the pot surrounded by by plants it has a an obelisk and Princess Kate grew very well here last year up the Obelisk and I started tying her into the tree this is a snake bark maple and I've done the same this year and she will grow up into the canopy and flower um she was in flour for about three months last year of thinking so this will provide a nice spot of color in a again a place in the garden that's not very promising now I know this doesn't classify as a pot but the greenhouse here had the benefit of a large Acer growing where the rhubarb pot is and it would provide shade because this is a greenhouse where I keep seeds and seedlings and I didn't want it to be in full sun by planting it here it saves me having to put anything over the the glass or paint the glass to stop the Summer sun burning the contents of the greenhouse as you see there are one or two clematis in the process of of growing all young clematis and I've got some seeds there which I must prick out well they're spaced out enough to do so these are atrogen seeds anyway the purpose of bringing you down here was to show you that because the Acer has now had to be cut down it was quite diseased I've had to do something else to provide the shade for the greenhouse and I've put this trellis up and I have planted spring flowering clematis all the way along why spring flowering ones well because they keep their leaves all through the summer and they will gradually grow up to the top of the trellising here and apart from the winter when they don't have any leaves they will be acting as a buffer to keep the sun off the plants inside I've underplanted with geraniums and this is similar to using a pot because the wooden window box structure that I've made has no bottom to it so the top is filled with good gritty compost it's very gritty this compost and will therefore protect the crowns from getting too wet but the roots will go down into the sub soil and be able to get all the nutrients and all the water that they need when you've seen the garden and how I use pots and the various ways that I use pots so I'm going to show you now how I plant them up this is one of the plain black plastic pots that would fit into an outer container now just for the sake of saving my back this is a plastic one and I want you to imagine that this is a ceramic container and as you see the black one fits neatly inside you can't see it so all you can see is the the nicer pot I'll just put that back for now this is filled with peach-free compost I don't always use peak-free compost but more and more I'm trying to use it for for obvious reasons um Peak free compost come in all sort of shapes and sizes and a variety of things that they put in to make it I'm not a great lover of it but I don't think we've got any choice growing pots it's important to put in lots of feed and I use a 12 month feed this one is called osmocote it's a a granule one like Miracle Grow and as the temperature reaches 70 or above these granules release the nutrients that they have within them there are two ways of doing it um you can either take a handful and Scatter it liberally throughout the compost that you're going to use and make sure that's well mixed in or as as I do for pots that have already been planted but need to be refreshed the following year I use the dibber and I put the dibber down the side to make a hole take a handful of the compost of the nutrients and just fill the hole with it and for a pot like this I'd probably do four and that would be sufficient to feed the the plants for the whole season foreign this is a Rhema Davidson it's a miniature clematis it won't grow any taller than the um the stems that are there it has lots of buds and some flowers that are coming out so it's ideal for putting right outside our patio door that will fit in in there the instructions here do say that you're supposed to bury this one two three inches more deeply than it is in the pot however that would be difficult to do I would have to be covering up quite a few leaves the idea of burying it more deeply is to get some of those nodes below the soil so what I'll do I'll plant it at the same depth but I'll leave enough room in the top of the pot so the next spring I will put some more compost on top and therefore effectively bury the clematis more than it is at the present time right so let's take this out of the pot it's a good root ball um I've had this soaking up water for half an hour the roots are not extensive throughout it but it's it's good enough I'll put it in here and just fill up around the side with more peat-free compost there we are and that will sit on the patio inside one of the ceramic pots so that it can be shown off I'll probably put a very small Wigwam of canes around it just to support the stems although given it so small I could let it flop over the edges and it these are not going to go down more than a foot or so so that's a nice addition to the patio you can plant other things in pots they don't have to be designed for low growing or designed for the patio and I've got some examples here this is markham's Pink it's a spring flower Clements as part of the atrogene family and these require very gritty compost because they come from Alpine Regions they're used to pour soil they don't like being in a buggy place and if you live somewhere on a flood plain you'll probably struggle to grow these there is a way you can help that which I'll show you in a few minutes but I could put this in a larger pot like the one I've just shown you but I would add the comp to the compost 50 percent grit so it would be 50 50 mix very similar to the way you would do an ordinary Alpine if you grew alpines the pot is quite heavy because it has a 50 50 mix in it but it means that it will get good drainage and you don't plant these lower than they are in the pot because the crown which is the junction between the roots and the stem that needs to be kept as dry as possible so ideally that's just on the surface certainly not below you would kill the plant it's the same with Montana's Montana's require similar conditions the word Montana means of the mountain and so they grow in in screed and well-drained composts and and soils none of them grow above the Snow Line it'd just be too wet but it means that they're very Hardy and suited for an English winter also in one of those pots I could plant some young atrogens this again is markham's pink and I've got three of them here what I could do is to use one of those same black pots and plant three round the sides and put a wigwam of canes there'll be much taller canes because these will grow well potentially up to seven feet but it'll take a few years for that to happen and they would be quite happy in a pot like that with the gritty compost 50 50 and with being fed with the awesomer coat for three or four years then I would either have to choose to put them in a bigger pot or knock the compost off and replenish it with fresh compost or take it them out it would look like one plant by then and plant it in the in the border and it would have a very big root system far bigger than these these would not cope if I planted them in the Border they're too young but that certainly would produce a robust plant as it would if I planted one of these in a two liter pot and grew it onto the sort of size you would see if you went to a garden center put those two on side have a look at this one exactly the same size pot so that this can go in and outer ceramic pot or it could be hidden in herbaceous borders so you don't see the pot now this is a viticella viticellas grow very tall and not the sort of thing you would possibly think of growing in a pot but as you see I'm growing this around a circular cane it's already grown at one side and is coming down the the other side and is ready to go along the bottom and up the cane again and this will produce a real wall of flower rather than allowing it to go 10 12 feet into the air and me craning my neck to see it I keep it at a level like this and it's got several buds on it it buds from the leaf joints and that will be very pretty in probably five or six weeks when it's finished I can cut it down like I would any other viticella either in the Autumn or in the spring depending what part of the UK you live and I can do the same next year or treat it like a conventional viticella plant it in the ground and give it something to climb up either a fence a post or or through some some roses or shrubs here is another but this is a slightly different cat the fish this is Mrs Chumley now I've had several goals at growing Mrs Chumley in the garden but she has died on me one of those large flowered hybrids that don't like my soil so I decided to grow her in a pot where I can make sure she's in very good compost make sure she's fed look after her better than I could if she was planting the garden however since I grew this in the pot the original Mrs Chumley having been dormant for three years has suddenly decided to grow again and she's now looking very healthy on one of the fences clematists do that they sometimes disappear and then reappear now because this is very tall already I would snap that if I tried to bend it down so to grow in the pot this year I'm going to have to base this pot next to something that will support it the first strong wind we have will break that off um and it might batter some of the lower ones and I will lose a lot of buds um this tree next to me I could put it next to the tree and tie it in and let it grow into the canopy there is one around the other side that I've done that with with Princess Kate and she's in a large ceramic pot not one of these black ones as in inner she's in a large ceramic pot so I can't really move her and she seems very happy she flowered for a long time last year so I need to do something similar with this one as an alternative to clematis if you want to ring the changes in your ceramic pots with the plastic inners you can plant pansies in one of these just for a change or certainly during the winter I do this get some winter flowering pansies for some color when I'm unlikely to have many clematis in flour and certainly none that would look good on the patio so you can really ring the changes without breaking your back on these large pots obviously we all spend on on attractive pots what we can afford I see nothing wrong in some of the large plastic pots I think it's a bit of a myth that clematis need that cool a root run and need to have their feet in the shade and their head in the sun in fact that's that's actually not true because there are a number of clematists that will not Thrive if they have the head in the sun mainly the stripy ones and pale ones the sun degrades the quality of the flower very quickly so those need some dappled shade but you can play around when they're in pots you can move them around to see where they look best or where they they look as if they're happier than some of the other places and I so I find it as a system very useful now I mentioned before that if you have very wet ground you probably would struggle to grow Montana's or these spring flowered atrogines you did see when I showed you the garden that some of the pots I have I said had no bottom in them this is a against a plastic pot but I have ceramic pots where I've taken the bottom out I've need to use needed to use a grinder to do that so it's easier with these plastic ones and the secret is to wedge these so that they don't move either wedge them by planting them into the soil up to about six inches and pack the soil around or next to structures you you could actually put a screw in the top and screw it into wooden post to make sure that it wouldn't move then that gives you the option of using a very gritty compost so that you can grow a Montana or an atrogine and the watering and feeding Roots will get through the bottom into the soil where they will get all the water that they need whilst keeping the crown reasonably dry it's worth trying it works for me in a number of locations so whether you want to use pots in the garden because they're a convenient way of growing plants or whether you use them so that you can ring the changes with color and bring the ones in flower to the fore and move the ones that are finished flowering to the back or like I do put them next to the greenhouse it doesn't matter but I contend that pots are very useful addition to a garden even if you've got good soil it does give you more options and many clematis like growing in pots and I have a number of clematists that I failed to grow in our soil but I can grow in pots but you need to make sure that you tie them in if they're going to get very tall either by creating your own structure for them or putting them next to a natural structure and tying them in because wind is one of the clematis worst enemies well I hope this has been useful um those of you that watch it let me know if there are any aspects I've missed out or whether you have different ways of doing things we can all learn from each other and also if you have any ideas for videos on clematis that I haven't covered I think I'll probably do one on pests and diseases later this year but apart from that I think I've probably covered the whole gamut of growing clematis but let me know if you have any different ideas it's a lovely day where I am I hope it is where you are have a good summer happy gardening get lots of clematis bye

Channel: Ken Black Clematis

Views: 96,258

Keywords: garden, gardening, Potting, soil, planting, clematis, pruning, trimming, flowers, propagating, grass, seeds, horticulture, colour, leaves, climbers, trees, shrubs, shrubbery, tutorial, how to, feed, water, Tutorials, growing, pests, diseases, gardens, cuttings, displaying, information, pots, cultivation, blooms, Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn, perfume, talks, gardening clubs, horticultural societies, Shows, leaflets, videos, instructional, compost, drainage, feeding, watering, gardeners, integrifolias, diversifolias, texensis, viornas, USA, UK

Id: BsPUcelUTNo

Length: 33min 23sec (2003 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 18 2023