If you can just wait a year or two, you won't have any problem :-) The SAC will overwhelm and devour the others and they'll be history. Honestly, a single SAC growing on that structure is more than sufficient - you do know it will easily attain a size of 25-30' and if nothing to support it, will seek out its own support on anything standing nearby?

You may be OK for the rest of this season, but I'd seriously consider moving either the SAC to a more appropriately-sized support system or leaving it to swallow the arbor and moving the others. All 5 will not coexist peacefully.

I would remove the SAC by judiciously spraying it with round up next spring and leaving the rest.

Actually SAC is pretty manageable in zone 5, but not on a small arbor. I use 2 SACs as a privacy barrier, along one side of my garden, since the area is not wide enough for shrubs because of the hardscape. I have posted these pictures before, so sorry to the rest of you who have seen them, but in this case I think a picture is probably most helpful. In the first picture, the 2nd SAC grows down the fence 20 ft and up and across a 7 by 4 ft arch. All of this growth happens between mid-April (cutback time) until mid-September (bloomtime). The first SAC was planted in 2003, the second in 2004, & the pictures taken in 2006.

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Your pictures/plants are beautiful!!!

Thanks for the advice. This is the arbor I was attempting to suffocate with too many clematis! Not quite as spacious as the arbor an fence leslie 197 is using for her gorgeous plants! [IMG]http://i204.photobucket.com/albums/bb19/patreeshia/100_0757_00.jpg[/IMG]

Sorry, I'm new at this. This is the arbor.
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Based on your arbor, the SAC definitely has to go. I would leave the others on it and remove the SAC.

If you have the 3s, (jack & BA) on one side & the 2s on the other, I second that. Otherwise in the future it might be difficult to tell which should be hard pruned in the Spring. Next year you could hard prune them all, but after a while you may want to wait until after blooming to cut back the 2s some.

Marie in ME

Your arbor is really pretty but too small for a SAC alone.

I would just prune them all as III's and not worry about it.

You can't hurt a II by pruning it as a III. It just delays the flowering a bit.

As the OP is in zone 5, I just want to give a small note of warning on pruning. Pruning group 2 as group 3 doesn't work very well for me. It usually delays the flowering more than a bit, especially if the clematis is in an open area instead of on a house wall or in a sheltered spot.

I get very little bloom on either Ramona or Will Goodwin (the only two group 2s that I have left) if they are hard pruned or if they get hit by a lot of dieback over the winter. Plus an early freeze can get the flower buds, especially on Will. Another problem is the cold night temps we sometimes get in late summer. When that happens the flowers open poorly or just look odd.

Ernest Markham does pretty well, but most of the ones I have tried do not. I know some zone 5 people, especially those further south of me, do well with type 2s, but they really need a longer season than mine. My season starts late (partly due to cold wet clay soil in addition to my northern location) and also ends early. Mostly between the wilt, mildew problems when we do get hot, and dieback I just don't bother with type 2s much anymore and have replaced them with ones that are more floriferous and have a longer bloomtime for me.

Leslie, read the post on Warsaw Nike and see if you have followed the experiment I suggested with your type IIs. That is the only way to say if they won't perform well for you being treated as type IIIs. Making sure they get established well by being treated as type IIIs the first two years or trying to report information on clematis that are relatively new is not giving fair time for your clematis to get established to say whether they will do well for you or not. If you have done what I suggested and still have had the results you reported, I concur with you that for your garden that you can't treat them as type IIIs and get the results you want. Others in your area however may not have the same results as you due to microclimates. Each and every garden is a different entity and results may vary in each unique garden.

Nckvilledudes,

I think that the experiment that you suggest in the Warsaw Nike thread is a very good idea. I believe I have heard (read) you express this sentiment before. It just won't be me doing the experiment, since I am really pretty much done with them. Too many problems, too often. I didn't even mention the rabbits - if rabbits eat Betty Corning she just buries them in vine and flowers, not so with a Type 2. So for me, anyway, I'm sticking with things that like my yard. And the best thing is that there are plenty of them that do.

Also wanted to mention that the texensis-viorna varieties I tried are all doing very well here as well. I wrote the forum here asking about good varieties and you and several other people put me on the right track with them. And also that I don't have trouble with the Late Large flowering ones either, although they take quite a bit of time to establish well.

I have to admit that I have not followed your experiment directions completely (as I'll explain below) but have given the Type 2s a pretty good shot in my present garden. My point in posting is that Type 2s are not always easy in some gardens and that a broad comment that Type 2s can be treated as 3s with no problems isn't necessarily so everywhere and certainly isn't proven to my satisfaction anyway.

BTW, this is my third long-term zone 5 garden and this particular garden is by far the most difficult one to grow many things. I know lots of fellow gardeners here that can grow Type 2s well, but noone I know has even tried to grow them with hard pruning. Cut off the early blooms -- no way -- people here are starved for blooms in spring! LOL.

One thing I want to thank you and the others here for is the wonderful info on growing clematis that is provided here. Prior to joining Gardenweb in 2005 I had not heard about planting clematis deeper in the ground than they were in the pots. I have lost a bunch of Type 2s from the dreaded WILT over the years and was pretty unsatisfied in general with clematis as a result of that. WILT always meant in my mind at least a dead plant and hardly ever was I surprised with one returning after the WILT.

I did however know to treat the Type 2s like a Type 3 by hard pruning them in their first few years and have always done that. Must have read it somewhere or heard about it at a meeting at some time or another. I am also a patient gardener and fully expect and accept the Sleep, Creep, Leap idea and will even go to Sleep, Creep, Creep, Leap in my difficult present garden.

Over the years I have tried just about every common variety of Type 2 clematis that has been available at local nurseries here, things like The President, General Sikorski, Niobe, Nelly Moser, Duchess of Edinburgh, Henryi etc. These were all fairly large well-rooted plants from reputable nurseries and were treated by me as I would have treated any expensive perennial - with reasonable care, but no specialist knowledge.

I also had a previous garden where I inherited six established Type 2s. These all bloomed enough so that I could tell that they were different varieties and could semi-identify them, but none of them ever really put on a big show. The roses they were planted with did well.

Here are some other examples: The President was in my current garden for 10 years, doing not much of anything, 5 feet away from a Jackmanii that was & is a blooming machine. Now there is a perfectly lovely Prince Charles in its spot. Nelly was here for 5 years and has been replaced by Polish Spirit. PS is 5 times bigger and blooms most of the season. Henryi and Duchess of E followed each other in the same spot, Henryi lasted a few years, D of E died of Wilt the first time it bloomed. Huldine in two years has put out more blooms for me than the previous two together ever did in their 5 combined years.

Will Goodwin was planted in 2003 and hard pruned each year (planted too closely with C x durandii to do otherwise) and has produced a few dozen blooms in 3 seasons and got the sudden WILT this year. Ramona was planted in 2001, was never hard pruned, at least partially because for the first few years she died back to the ground. She too has produced a few dozen blooms in six years! Meanwhile, Comtesse de Bouchard, a Late Large Flowering clematis, planted the same time as Ramona, is currently taking down the branches of a Purple SandCherry with her heavy bloom and competing with the tree roots, some large shrubs & big daylilies at the same time.

So in its own way, I think that my fairly expensive experiment with Type 2s, while not perfect (sort of hard to do when the Type 2s die like flies) has proved that at least in this garden, this zone 5 garden, this gardener, cannot grow satisfactory Type 2s as Type 2s or as Type 3s.

Hey Leslie, it sounds to me that you have done due diligence with your type IIs. I think that besides all the issues that people like you in the colder zones have to deal with, you also have to deal with Mother Nature potentially hard pruning every type of clematis to the ground each winter. That would be a disappointment especially for the type IIs that require both old wood and cold treatment to get the double blooms. Everyone has to determine what is worth growing or not growing in their gardens. If I were in your boat, it would be type IIIs only! In fact, in my zone, if I could have do overs, I would make a lot of different choices including not including type IIs in my garden. However, there are some type IIIs I wouldn't include also! Glad that the posters here have been of help in your growing decisions. Happy growing!!!