Listen to NPR's Ketzel Levine as she travels to a greenhouse outside Portland, Ore., to visit with one of the world's leading experts on the genus Clematis.

 Clematis with puckered red lips? Step into the greenhouse.

Brewster Rogerson Posing with C. pitcheri View enlargement

August 2002 -- Brewster Rogerson is a wirey octogenarian with a white buzz cut and a full-faced beard. He has delicate features and patient, caring hands. He has handled thousands, perhaps millions of tendrils and leaves during his three decades growing clematis, a flowering vine known to snap at a sneeze. Yet he still approaches them with humility.

Clematis do not seem to attract experts who insist on notoriety. Its high priests and priestesses appear to be retiring types (all the better to serve?). In that way, Brewster Rogerson is no exception, having worked in relatively obscurity at a wholesale nursery in rural Oregon, all the while amassing a plant collection that is certainly without equal in the U.S.

Yet suddenly, having asked very little of his community -- specifically, the horticultural community of Portland -- this reticent, proud and independent man finds himself and his clematis in an increasingly vulnerable position. His eyesight is failing - he has macular degeneration -- he expects it will only get worse, and he now fully realizes the time is fast approaching when he will no longer be able to keep up with his plants.

What to do? Find a home for his collection, nearly 900 plants (500 distinct specimens) that need constant attention: watering, feeding, pinching, pruning, re-potting, root pruning, and seed-collecting. For starters.

Where to put it? Ideally, an existing institution, a botanic garden or an arboretum, already set up to care for and display plants. That way, this rare, personal collection could go public, drawing students of the genus from all over the world.

What's the problem? What else? Money. A collection like this needs a curator; it can’t simply be parceled out among existing staff. It needs a greenhouse and it needs garden space and it needs an endowment to keep it going. Otherwise, the whole collection will slowly die.

So what's going to happen? Your guess is as good as mine. Both Brewster Rogerson and the Pacific Northwest Clematis Society are hoping to find someone local with deep pockets who will endow the collection to a public garden here in Portland. Failing that, Rogerson will sell off the collection -- ideally, to a few other collectors. At worst, at a fire sale, one by one.

For now, Brewster Rogerson continues to visit his greenhouse daily and tend his plants. He also continues to write about the genus for the International Clematis Society, where you can read his Clematis of the Month columns stretching back five years. For his own reading, Professor Rogerson (he retired in '81) prefers the poetry of John Milton. I leave anyone interested in the professor's clematis collection with this excerpt from Paradise Lost:

Good, the more
Communicated, more abundant grows.

Spread the word.


For All You Budding Clemateers

An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Clematis (Timber Press)

 An Illustrated Encyclopedia to Clematis by Mary Toomey & Everett Leeds. A voluptuous book befitting the Queen of Climbers. Co-author Toomey is featured in our report.

 Clematis on Weekend Edition Saturday offers planting advice and - oh joy - more links.