On to whats looking good at the moment all the atragenes ,the following are in flower koreana Broughton Bride ,koreana Brunette ,koreana Stephenie,and the brand new Bens Beauty.

Come along 24th – 25th March 2012 and see our nursery in action.

Doors will be open from 10am – 4pm each day.

There will be an entrance fee of just £1 and all donations will be going to our charity the Frenchay After Burns Childrens Club. You can find out more about them here .

We are easy to find based at Showell Nurseries Showell, Chippenham, Wiltshire SN15 2NU. Just off the A350 between Chippenham and Lacock . See directions here and there will be plenty of free parking.

There is lots to do in the area with the national Trust village of Lacock within a 5 minute drive, other nurseries near by opening their doors to you as well.

If you are interested send us a quick email via our contact form and we will keep you informed as things progress.

We took along the brand new Clematis Abeline and it was our star of show.  A new beautiful peachy pink hybrid which flowers from May to September.

So this month we have added two new clematis to our range. Clematis Abeline and lovely Clematis Chevalier with deep purple blue flowers from May to September. We shall be adding them to the site very soon so please check back often for photos and to place your order.

Last but no means least we got Silver Gilt at the New Forest Show .

And so on to Cornwall after a very long day and quite a late finish (about one in the morning of the judging day), then getting up at  5am for one last check of the plants and display, it was another Silver Gilt. The star of our display this time was clematis Tie Dye a beautiful summer flowering clematis with tie dye effect white markings (hence the name) on a deep blue background.

Here are a few pictures of our display.

At the time I was working in a local garden center and was in charge of ordering the climbers. My first clematis came from James Coles and Sons, of Leicester – it was ‘WADA’S PRIMROSE’ (C.patens ‘Manshuu Ki’): a lovely creamy-white large-flowered hybrid, which I planted next to the old red stone brick wall of the converted barn at my parents’ home. Next came C.cirrhosa var. balearica – the beginning of an eventual ‘mass planting’ of 80 or so clematis on the walls of that barn! Others that to this day stand out in my mind are ‘Victoria’, a beautiful pale lilca, flowering from June to September, ‘Walter Pennell’, the purple double and ‘Comtesse de Bouchard’, a wonderful pink for a north wall.

1987 dawned and I moved on to pastures new, running a wholesale nursery for Avon Valley Nurseries. I convinced the owner that we should start growing clematis and in the first year we gre 1000 plants and sold the whole lot within a week of them being ready, uncluding the usual suspects ‘ Nelly Noser’, ‘Niobe’, ‘The President’ and Hagely Hybrid’ to name but a few.

In due course, having noticed that people seemed to be showing more interest in them, I began to introduce some of the smaller-flowered clematis including Viticellas, Montanas and Integrifolias. Those that sold really ell were ‘Madam Julia Correvon’, C.cirrhosa var. purpurascens ‘Freckles’ and C. x triternata ‘Rubromarginata’.

In 1992 ‘Floyds Climbers and Clematis’ was born and we started off as a wholesale nursery growing between 15-20,000 plants a year, supplying the local garden centres. It was really difficult to convince them to try the herbaceous clematis – they would put them on the ‘climbing’ lines and wonder why they wouldn’t sell when only two foot tall, but we gradually convinced them to put them with the other herbaceous plants. Our best small-flowered clematis during this time was C. heracleifolia ‘Wyevale’ (now C. tubulosa ‘Wyevale’), an exquisite blue hyacinth-scented herbaceous cultivar flowering throughout August and September (the foliage too is aromatic, when fading).

Our Best large-flowered seller of the time was Doctor Ruppel. We would sell between 200 to 300 per year, followed closely by the beautiful blue ‘Fujimusume’.

The Kaleidosciope of life turnde once again and in the year 200 we (being myself and Sara, my good lady or ‘better half’ as they say) bought seven acres of land in Kelston, near Bath, Somerset and by 2002 we had gradually started to become more retail oriented, deciding this was the way to go! In 2003 we accomplished our first exhibit at the Royal Cornwall Show: among the plants we showed were ‘Alba Luxurians’, ‘Alionushka’, ‘Zobluepi’ (BLUE PIROUETTE), ‘Etoile Violette’ and C. x diversifolia ‘Heather Herschell’. What we really found of interest was that the public loved the fact they could buy clematis that would tolerate wind, not suffer wilt and flower all summer long: great for them and for us.

In may 2007 we showed at the Devon County Show for the first time and among our exhibits where two clematis from the Brian Collingwood stable of hybridisation: the petite ‘Jolly Jake’ (Viticella Group) which is a lovely deep lilac, named for our wonderful little son; and the beautiful ‘Sara’ a Viorna Group cross, a stunning deep pink on the outside of the urn-shaped flowers and creamy yellow on the inside.

My Thoughts for the immediate future are: ‘Beware large-flowereds – the little ones are taking over and there’s no stopping them!

Marcel Floyd

Submitted and published in ‘The Clematis 2007′ – The Journal of the British Clematis Society

Thank you for reading I am going to start off with the article a wrote a few years ago for the BCS.

Marcel