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Northwestern Gardening

If you had to pick 3 CLIMBERS for a pergola...

16 years ago

...which ones would you choose? are your favorites?

Our pergola will be 13' wide by 16' long and we want to plant 3 of the posts with deciduous climbers (so we get light in the winter), but all different. The site faces south, so its very sunny & warm in the summer and also can get a LOT of wind! We'd like some fragrance, some color, possibly awesome foliage on one...

Thanks a lot for any ideas!

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Comments (5)

flowerfan2
16 years ago
I love clematis so that would be my choice. The type 3 clems you can cut back hard every fall so your pergola will let in a lot of light. I like Hagley hybrid, xtriternata rubra marginata, and sweet autumn clematis. The hagley hybid has large pink flowers in May and June. The triternata has small white and red flowers June-August which are very fragrant, and the SAC has fragrant white flowers Sept-Oct. There would be something blooming on it all summer. There are thousands of different clematis that you could choose. These have all done well for me. The SAC does get large and may need additional pruning in June to keep it from smothering the other vines. The foliage is nice and green all summer and disease and pest free and should give you a lot of shade in the summer. You can find pictures of these flowers at clematis on the web.

Here is a link that might be useful: clematis on the web
sweetpea_path
Original Author
16 years ago
flowerfan2 ~ say, those are GREAT ideas! I knew I wanted 3 different climbers, but I hadn't thought of the option of 3 from the same genus. I had thought about the option of continuous blooms, so I appreciate your details about bloom times. I will most definitely check out that link. I LOVE clematis and it was on my list as a possible, although I'd been considering a c. montana (had one at a rental cottage once & fell in love with it). I also like your choices for the chopping-them-down option so I can have lots of light in the winter.

Thanks much for the suggestions!
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I'd definitely agree, go with Illusion among those two choices, particularly in zone 6. I haven't been able to get Crimson Sky to overwinter in zone 5 and even if it survives in zone 6 it's not likely to be a climber. Also, $59 is an insanely expensive price to pay for a rose - we could do better than that. For instance, Regan's sells Crimson Sky for under $20, though they're done with bareroot sales for this year. An alternative to Illusion that blooms a lot more often for me is Quadra, and it would be rock solid hardy for you and pretty trouble free. Both Quadra and Illusion are available from Hortico for $17.99 plus shipping, and those are bareroot grafted roses that give the rose a little head start toward settling in to be a climber. Roses Unlimited also carries Illusion, and a gallon sized plant is a bit bigger than a band-sized plant, though both will grow fine. Those would be own-root plants, where there isn't a graft and the same rose would regrow if you have to cut it back to the ground (shouldn't be necessary with both of these latter two roses). Here is Illusion on one side of my front yard in a good year - the trouble is it only does this about 3 times a year at best so there are times it's just green. A more reliable bloomer most of the season for me is Quadra, which is at the other end of my house in similar conditions. Quadra will have some rest periods, but it looks like this off and on all summer. Both of these roses are healthy and hardy, though any rose takes some pruning out of dead wood periodically. Both are also toward the crimson side of red rather than "fire engine red", which applies to a whole lot of red roses frankly. Do remember that any climber takes about 3-4 years to fully settle in, so don't expect either one to look like this in its first couple of years. You want a climber to put on growth and build cane structure in the first few years, and blooms are secondary considerations at first. Also be sure to use something to tie the canes to a climbing structure (they don't hang on themselves like clematis does) and do your best to train as many of the biggest canes to bend sideways or horizontally, so that the blooming canes or "laterals" stretch upward from those initial sideways canes. Otherwise you can get blooms just at the tips of those main canes and not all along the way. You can see a cane bending sideways for Quadra in the photo above toward the right side of the arch, and that cane itself isn't blooming until the laterals that branch off it are growing. Hope this helps! Cynthia
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boxofrox
16 years ago
I have a pondside deck/pergola that is somewhat smaller at about 7'x 12'. I have a white Wisteria (bought it before I knew what it was :-) on one post, a 'Star Jasmine' on another post, and a Mandevilla 'Alice Dupont' in a pot going up a third post. On a cedar/copper fence next to the pergola I have two roses, an 'America' and a 'Stairway to Heaven' and 2 Clematis, a 'Julka' and a 'Toki'.

The white wisteria and I have a love hate relationship....I absolutely love the fragrance and the shade the foliage provides for us to sit pondside and imbibe after a long hard day. Before it matured we had to have a shade cloth because of the afternoon sun. What I hate is the mess that the blossoms make in the spring and the leaves in the fall. The pond has koi so I'm forever trying to keep it out of the water. This is only year two for the roses and clematis so it's a bit too soon to get ga-ga over them yet :-) The mandevilla was great the first year but I tried to overwinter inside with marginal results. The jasmine is just now overcoming our strange winter.
aftermidnight Zone7b B.C. Canada
16 years ago
Another vine, Actinidia kolomikta (sp?) might be suitable for your pergola, mine is where it gets a fair bit of wind and seems to do all right.

A......
buyorsell888
16 years ago
Instead of Hagley Hybrid which fades badly in sun and isn't very vigorous or long blooming try Betty Corning (fragrant) or Venosa violacae or Polish Spirit or Etoile Violette or Huldine. They bloom later but longer and are much larger with more flowers. All are the type you whack down each year.

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