A few snaps of intense colour: Clematis William Kennett

I am not about to launch into a vast wordy description of this Clematis as its’ defining feature in my opinion is it’s colour and with the best will in the world, pictures will describe that much better than I can.  A fairly new Clematis in our collection, ‘William Kennett’ is as described in most places mid mauve-blue with star shaped sepals.  But it is so much more than that simple description suggests.  In dimming lights the flowers literally glow, although in real life the colour is much bluer than the photos suggest but I have not fiddled the saturation levels at all.  In my opinion it is very worthy of the ‘queen of clematis’ claim I discovered on the label having wedged my head through a wall of runner beans laced with spiders webs to read the variety.  Definitely got web in the hair.  Also side note, how can something be described as a ‘queen’ with a male name?

The growing habit of this variety is also rather novel.  Flowering almost exclusively at the top of the plant and fence in three distinct layers like a cake, it almost seems like its attempting to share it’s joyousness with next door, which is very unnecessary of it.  I paid for it and I expect exclusive viewing rights.  It would also have been good if it could have flowered about four inches lower for those of us who are somewhat vertically challenged and don’t wish to half climb the fence. The flowers’ intense colour fades in the sun and this results in a bleached ombre effect with very pale flowers on top graduating to dark ones tucked underneath.

I took a lot of photos because I was fascinated by how the colour showed up, but here is a small selection: