A yearly miracle

It gets me every single time

When I was writing my book, The Calm Place, during the madness and uncertainty of 2020, I was amazed over and over again at how many things I noticed in my miniscule garden, and how I was unsure if they’d never been there before (berries on a plant, myriad different shades of green), or if I’d just never bothered looking properly and had walked past them every previous year without registering they were even there. One thing that I did always notice every year though was the new growth on the clematis by our front door.

Clematis montana is the common-or-garden clematis that is basically ubiquitous across suburbia in the UK, with its 4-petalled pale pink flowers draping themselves drunkenly across walls, bushes, and pretty much anywhere else that will have them. Buds start appearing in very early spring, and by late spring/early summer the pink flowers feel like they’re everywhere you turn. Which is lovely, but I must say that my favourite part of their life cycle is the weeks before the buds open into flower, gradually growing and bulging and announcing that they (and summer) are on the way.

I took this picture of this year’s new buds a couple of weeks ago:

Every year over winter I’m convinced that it’s dead this time, the woody stems look so dessicated and devoid of life. And every year I’m surprised when I see first the tiny leaves and then the buds starting to emerge. This is what I wrote in the March chapter of my book:

I’m so, so excited by those tiny clematis buds. I’m not at all sure that it will be as extensively flowering as previous years - there are lots of swollen joints that don’t look like they’re budding, as well as the ones that are. But those tiny orbs of burgeoning beauty still fill me with hope, even if this year it doesn’t turn out to be as prolific as usual. Right now (mid-month) the flower buds are two to three millimetres in diameter, just emerging from the base of the only recently-emerged leaves. The newest ones still cluster tightly together, but the woody stem closest to the front door has a couple of bunches that are starting to stretch out. As they get older they’ll bulge more and more, like hundreds of pregnant bellies, stretching their skin in anticipation of that bursting forth of new, joyful life. It doesn’t matter how crap I feel, it never fails to make my heart leap.

Just today I took another picture to show their progress:

They’re filling out, reaching away from the base of the leaves, and will continue to inflate until they can’t hold themselves in any more. Meanwhile the leaves are getting bigger and less newborn-green, and that woody skeleton, still largely exposed to view, will soon be covered in its pink and green summer outfit.

Winter this year feels like it’s gone on for ages, and spring has had its work cut out trying to break through and make its presence felt. These buds though always let me know that spring really is in the ascendancy, at last. Now all we need is for the temperature to follow suit!