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Clematis heaven

Ursula Buchan

Tuesday, 18th March 2008

Ursula Buchan does a spot of gardening

If you are an assiduous buyer of plants, you will know that there are quite a number of foreign-bred plants for sale in our nurseries. This has become more obvious in recent years, since the nomenclature rules have changed. These days a plant should be sold under its original name — if it is in a language using Roman script, at least. Penstemon ‘Garnet’, for example, should now be labelled Penstemon ‘Andenken an Friedrich Hahn’. It may not be as snappy, but it is right and proper, since this Penstemon was bred in Germany.

If you are a keen grower of clematis, you will certainly know that there are a number of excellent garden varieties with Polish names: ‘Blekitny Aniol’, ‘Kardynal Wyszynski’, ‘General Sikorski’, ‘Warszawska Nike’, ‘Emilia Plater’, ‘Jan Pawel II’ and ‘Matka Siedliska’, for example. (They will probably be misspelled, since nursery labelling machines don’t do diacritic marks, but they are still obviously Polish.) However, you may not know that all these clematis — whose names often celebrate great patriotic luminaries of the Polish Church, such as Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Wyszynski, or famous military events in Poland’s history, like Monte Cassino and Westerplatte — have all been bred by a Jesuit monk, Brother Stefan Franczak, living quietly in a monastery in a Warsaw suburb.

In his youth, Brother Stefan studied animal breeding at university, but joined the Society of Jesus in 1948, aged 31. In 1950, his superiors put him in charge of the 1.5-hectare kitchen garden next to the monastery. When it looked as if the communist authorities might annex the garden for public building, the Jesuits decided to make it into an ornamental garden, open to the public. In time, this garden became known throughout Poland.

Brother Stefan began actively to breed clematis in the 1960s, after he found some self-sown seedlings in the garden. Amateur plant breeders are often exceptional people, with energy, patience and acute observational powers but Brother Stefan stands out, even in such company. His clematis are remarkable for their bright colours, good form, and profuse, extended flowering, as well as disease-resistance and hardiness. He would observe seedlings for up to 12 years before being satisfied enough to register them officially; to date, there are more than 60 registered.

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