I am Dave Epstein, this is Growing Wisdom, and today we’re going to talk about pruning some autumn clematis. There are basically three types of clematis. Clematis that are multi bloomers, they bloom a couple of times during the year; spring bloomers, they bloom earliest, and then your summer and fall blooming. I’m going to talk to you about pruning the latter ones, the summer and the fall one. They way you want to prune this is fairly aggressively. You can see there’s a lot of old growth here, if you have one of these, in an area where you don’t mind it, just kind of doing its thing, especially the autumn clematis, let it go, take off some of the dead stuff and then you can leave it. Against the house like this, if I don’t prune this, this is going to be too big so we can bring them down.
If you look closely when you’re pruning this clematis, there’s the new buds right here, you could prune up to the new buds, so take off everything above that and this would start growing and eventually flower. For me, I don’t want it up this high. This is well over four feet above the ground. So, I’m going to go down much lower here to find where there’s some new growth, but I’m going to make this a much shorter plant. That way it will take a lot longer to grow so high. I don’t want this to go all the way up the house too quickly.
If you’re asking when you should do this; prune before the new growth starts. So, we brought this down about two feet in height, eighteen inches and there’s a nice new bud right there, when I leave that, we’re going to put this up against the trellis, as that starts to grow in another few weeks, and eventually, over the course of the summer, this will cover the trellis and, in fall it will bloom beautifully. Also are the noticed things some nice new buds coming right up from the base of the plant and that’s a great sign. So remember when pruning an aggressive vine like autumn clematis, that flowers in the summer or the fall, you can take it back fairly close to the ground, maybe one to two feet up, look for those new buds that’s where you stop pruning, everything else above into the compost pile.
For Growing Wisdom, I am Dave Epstein.