Brewster Rogerson, Clematis Connoisseur Brewster Rogerson, Clematis ConnoisseurI first became familiar with Brewster Rogerson several years ago when fellow NAPPC board member Pamela Harper suggested that we contact him to hold a Clematis collection. He is probably the most knowledgeable person that I know in regards to this genus. He's also a very modest chap and I'm sure that he will cringe upon reading that statementBrewster Rogerson came to be interested in clematis about 22 years ago while he was a professor of English at Kansas State University. After buying his first two clematis when he realized it was hard to find out very much about them, or the genus in general, in the standard gardening books and catalogs of the day. Those books and catalogs mostly gave the same few details over and over, often with the same trade photographs. So he gave himself a little research assignment and began acquiring every clematis he could lay hands on.
By the time he retired in 1981, Brewster was determined to write a clematis book for American gardeners, or at least give it a try. He loaded his plants into a van and moved to Oregon, where he knew the Willamette Valley was hospitable to clematis. He bought a house, but not much land came with it, and before long there were so many plants that he was obliged to put the whole lot of them into containers and rent them a house. For the last ten years he's lived in apartments and commuted almost daily to a greenhouse west of Portland.
The nursery where the greenhouse is located, Gutmann's, is the main wholesale source of clematis in the area, so naturally he has much common ground with the owner, Bob Gutmann, and the clematis staff (John Long and Debbie Kind). He helps out around the nursery, and in return gets the greenhouse for a preposterously low rent. Indeed, he feels as if the nursery in effect subsidizes the collection, since he couldn't possibly keep it going at its current level without the help gets from those good friends.
Clematis 'Bees Jubilee'
At present, Brewster's is the largest private collection of clematis west of the Rockies. Possibly its most individual feature is that it's divided almost equally between large-flowered hybrids and the species, with their small-flowered cultivars. (Until recently most home gardeners who wanted clematis on a large scale have had eyes chiefly for the large-flowered hybrids, whereas botanical gardens traditionally concentrate on the species. Brewster has always looked for both.) As of this month he has roughly 200 in the first category and 186 in the second. I say "roughly" because at the end of a winter there are always a few doubtful cases-plants that are playing dead, or that have some how lost their labels. The total count, however, is much larger. He has to keep raising cuttings in order to maintain the collection, so in his 18' x 86' greenhouse there are usually around 700 plants, in pots of just about every size.
During the blooming season the collection has a good many visitors, mostly local but sometimes from afar, as with the four growers from Japan who paid a call in the summer of 1992, returned in 1993, and still stay in touch with Brewster. Though he does his share of slide-lectures for gardening organizations, he feels that it accomplishes more to arrange with small groups to meet at the nursery and tour the greenhouse together. That works well from mid-March to early June. By mid-June the place is so crammed with vegetation that only the jungle-trained can wriggle in and out. He tries to reserve a small area down front for young plants that he doesn't need, so that visitors who feel the occasion is incomplete if they have to go home empty-handed will have something to buy. Some of those "extras" are relatively rare. At least two, and possibly more, foreign cultivars that are now popping up in small growers' lists out West, came from those little rows of gallon pots.
Due to the nature of the collection, Brewster must turn down all requests to supply plants by mail. He's just not set up for it. Brewster's plants come from many sources. In the beginning, most of the less common ones came a few at a time from Jim Fisk, the English nurseryman who until his retirement ten years ago was a prop to the clematis trade worldwide. (He was consistently the main foreign supplier for Steffen's, the largest of our U.S. sources until its demise last year.)
For some years Brewster imported plants from Magnus Johnson, the Swedish grand old man of clematis. And, partly through the International Clematis Society, He networks with other collectors, with whom he exchanges seeds and information. In the years when he was trying hardest to develop sources he never found a fully satisfactory one in this country. There are signs we are beginning to do better, but even now most of his acquisitions reach him from Britain and Sweden, with a few from Japan.(In the next several years we are going to be seeing a goodly invasion of new clematis from Japan, Russia, and Estonia. Brewster already has a few.)
Brewster holds one of the registered collections of Clematis for the NAPPC. If you are serious about Clematis and would like to get in touch with Brewter, you can reach him by email at: smilecat@aracnet.com
-- Barry Glick
Partial list of Brewster Rogerson's published work:
"Clematis viticella and its Progeny," Pacific Horticulture, 46: 1 (Spring 1985), pp. 40-44.
Review of Fisk/Lloyd/Fretwell on Clematis, Pacific Horticulture, 51: 1 (Spring 1990), pp. 8-9.
"Buying a Clematis," American Horticulturist, April/May 1980, 29-33.
"A Clematis Calendar," The Avant Gardener (Vol. 15, No.10), Aug. 1983 ("Guest Special Issue" shared with Pamela Harper).
"Clematis viticella and its Progeny," Pacific Horticulture, 1983 *
"Tiny Flowers Make Big Hit," San Jose Mercury. February 14, 1985. Review, Fisk/Lloyd/Fretwell on Clematis, Pacific Horticulture *
"Visitors from Japan," HPSO Bulletin, Vol. 8, No. 2, Fall 1992, 3-6.
"A Clematis Collection in Containers," Clematis International 1992, pp. 49-52.
"Some New Clematis to Look For," HPSO Bulletin, Fall 1995, 12-14.
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