My parents had a clematis growing on their mailbox. It was a healthy and profusely overgrown. We wanted one for our mailbox, so we planted one last year. It was small, but it grew. Early this summer it began to bloom. It had large, lavender flowers.

And then one day I noticed some of the leaves had turned brown. I cut the branch off. Then a few more leaves turned brown. Then they all turned brown and shriveled up and died. I looked up the symptoms, and it seems we had a fungal infection, called clematis wilt.

There is apparently no treatment for clematis wilt. It eventually kills the plant back to the ground. So where we had a nice vine with a good bloom before, we ended up with a bare trellis and mailbox. The information I found gave some hope that the roots would survive, so we thought maybe the clematis would come back next year.

Surprise. It came back this year. I noticed a couple of bright green leaves at ground level first. I wasn’t sure it was actually the clematis, but it kept growing. Fast. So fast it seemed that if I turned my back on it, it would grow two inches by the time I turned back around. And it had lots of buds. One of them bloomed some time between Thursday evening and Friday morning. It rained lightly overnight, and a the flower was still wet when I took this photo.

Clematis comes in various forms, some shrubby and some climbing, like ours. There are some varieties that can grow quite tall, up to maybe 20 feet. Ours is not one of those, although it would be nice to have one like that. They are fast growers, as I can attest from ours. They are deciduous in our climate, so ours will lose its leaves over the winter, assuming it survives. If it keeps going as it is now, we should easily get a dozen or more blooms before cold weather.