Clematis heaven
Ursula Buchan
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.
In 1996, the garden was reduced to 0.5 hectare, after a church was built on part of it. Nevertheless, when I visited it five years ago, it still felt substantial, and I was struck by its distinct and restful charm. Clematis were everywhere, mainly trained up vertical metal reinforcing rods, and there were large beds of irises and hemerocallis (day lilies), the other two genera on which Brother Stefan worked. He was ill in a nursing home at the time, but I met his assistant, who showed me his ‘stud books’. It is impossible not to make a mental connection here with the Augustinian monk, Brother Gregor Mendel, who published his historic work on genetics in Brno, Czechoslovakia, only ten years before Brother Stefan was born in Jeziorna, Poland. And it is touching to think of him working away in obscurity in the grim communist days, producing beautiful plants with openly subversive names, for the glory of his God and his country.
He became known in Britain after Jim Fisk, a clematis nurseryman, introduced his ‘Jan Pawel II’ (‘John Paul II’) at the Chelsea Flower Show in 1982. Since then, most of his selections have arrived here thanks to his friend, Szczepan Marczynski, who was the man who showed me round the monastery garden. Szczepan is another impressive Pole, who was once an important Solidarnosc activist, and is also a breeder of fine clematis, including ‘Barbara’, ‘Jerzy Popieluszko’, ‘Lech Walesa’ and ‘Solidarnosc’. He has a progressively run nursery at Pruszkow, outside Warsaw, where he grows more than 100 different types of climber (which can be viewed at his exemplary website, www.clematis.com.pl). The latest Brother Stefan clematis to be introduced is ‘Slowianka’, and Szczepan says that there are likely to be more in the future. The monk also registered more than a hundred varieties of hemerocallis, most of them growing at Wojslawice, a branch of the Wroclaw Botanical Garden.
Five years ago, the monastery garden was nearly lost altogether when Brother Stefan’s superiors wanted to make it into a plain park. Then, 60 representations by clematis enthusiasts from across the world helped persuade the Rector (who cannot have known what hit him) not to do something so drastic, and Brother Stefan was allowed to keep a small garden for as long as he could manage it. Recently, however, he has become very frail, and is in a Jesuit retirement home. The monastery garden may now be almost all grassed over, but the fruits of this good man’s labours are to be seen every season all over the temperate world.
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