Watching Our Clematis Growing Yearly

I am loving the clematis we have growing in our raised bed flower bed. I can sit right here in my office and watch it growing.

Most places we rented didn’t have any space to grow things. The places we did rent which had space we didn’t have permission from the owners so you can imagine how happy we have been since buying our home.

Now we have tons of room to grow flowers, trees, shrubs, even a vegetable garden.

I planted a clematis right in the middle of one of our raised bed gardens, where I would be able to see it from my home office.

Jenny planted petunias all around it and made it look lovely. Petunias just happen to be Jenny’s favourite flower and she puts them everywhere she can still see them from the kitchen windows.

The first year our first clematis didn’t get very big but produced some gorgeous flowers.

We were looking forward to the follow year but weren’t sure it would survive the winter in a raised bed.

The following spring I was pretty sure it was dead as it looked like a pile of dead twigs but after a little while I saw life coming out of that pile of twigs.

It didn’t take much time once I saw the first chutes coming alive before the entire mess was covered with little green leaves. And not long after that before I was seeing buds produced, which are now beautiful flowers about 8 inches across.

Our Clematis, Second Year

The second year we started really getting a lot of blossoms or flowers. That convinced me that I should get a couple more so I picked up two more.

One I put in the raised bed, the other I put on the south side of the garage. And the following year we bought another to put on the other side of the first clematis in our raised bed.

Now we have one big clematis, our first and two that are trying to catch up.

Our raised bed is going to look pretty spectacular in another couple of years.

This year I planted nasturtiums across the front of the raised bed. The are just coming up now so they will take a bit before we have blossoms there but I am sure it will look great.

Here is a picture of our raised bed right now. I have put a net on the back of the trellis so that the clematis can grow up and eventually cover the entire trellis.

You can barely see the nasturtiums in the front of the raised bed. They only poked their little heads out of the dirt less than a week ago. We’ve had a very late season this year but things are looking great now.

Related articles

• Clematis favorites for Northwest gardeners (seattletimes.nwsource.com)