Clematis Wilt Rescue and Prevention

We have Barb in Hartville who asks, “I have a clematis that I bought from you guys two years ago, it’s been blooming, but it’s got that clematis wilt. It actually had it last year too. Is there anything I can do to help with that?”

That is a disease that overwinters in the soil, so it is important to keep it clean. Anything that you’re seeing, if it’s starting, I’d like to see a picture of it, to be honest. If you could bring a picture into one of the locations, that would be kind of the best thing to do.

Anything that’s coming off any of the dirty leaves or any brown leaves and anything that has that on there, you want to make sure you’re throwing that away. You can spray the rest of it with a copper fungicide because that will help it from spreading. So it will be prevented from next year, but this year, you can just stop it from spreading. You want to make sure you keep it clean. 

In the winter, you want to make sure you take that when you cut it down, just throw that away, don’t compost it, and make sure you keep your pruners sanitized because that’s how it spreads. It’s just a matter of keeping up the maintenance of it. But if you spray a copper fungicide, that will help it from spreading right now. You just want to do that in the evening. You don’t want to spray in the heat of the day.

It’s an environmental issue, mostly. If we have a crazy long, really cool wet spring, like we did this year, there is a potential for it to come back because it’s environmental. Once the environment changes, it’s less likely to come back. It’s really important just to keep everything kind of cleaned up because that will help prevent it from overwintering.

At the end of the season, when you take all the leaves and everything, you just want to make sure you don’t leave all the leaves and that kind of stuff laying there. You want to make sure you get rid of that and keep the soil fresh. That way, when the plant comes back in the spring, it’s got fresh ground and you don’t have to worry about any of that wilt overwintering.

Mulch is good to have around it. It helps hold moisture in the ground and keep the soil temperature more consistent, which is going to help the plant. You can do in the spring, you can do a powdered copper fungicide. That would help prevent it.

Questions? Email us at [email protected] or call one of our two locations: Portage (330-499-0101) or Everhard (330-492-1243).