In the Garden
Though I have not yet been challenged, I think I was mistaken in my autumn note that the clematis flammula or Maiden's Bower, belonging not among the ten main groups_ but to the miscellaneous species, was the only sweet-scented one in cultivation. I find on investiga- tion that there are four other clematises out of a list of 86 I have seen claiming to stand supreme above the others that, as in Shelley's poem to Jane Williams, "join not scent to hue.' One of these is C. rubro marginata, a sub-variety of flammula. Another is C. Armandi, the largest white form of the Armandii group, a half-hardy evergreen producing its flower-clusters from the axils of the leaves. Mr. Michael Haworth- Booth, in Effective Flowering Shrubs (1951), calls these flowers " fragrant." But Jackman's Planter's Handbook says nothing of the sort, and it might be said of Jackman on the clematis that " others abide our question. Thou art free." The two other clematises that add scent to hue I owe to a letter from a correspondent in Southern Rhodesia who saw my original note. Both grow wild there, and C. thunbergii crowns every thicket in April " with a foam of creamy white," its scent being "compounded of orange blossom and some other element—passion fruit, perhaps." My correspondent describes "the bacchanalian air of the cattle " as they return from browsing round the kopjes wearing garlands of this clematis. The other, a. relation, is Clematopsis stanleyi. with fewer but much larger flowers and said to have a " faint. scent." As neither of these clematises has, I believe, been acclimatised in Eng- land, the third is a close hybrid of flammula, and the fourth is not mentioned by Jackman as possessing this double virtue, perhaps my
error may be whittled down to a peccadillo: H. J. MASSINOHAM.
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