The fluffy clouds of fruits of the Traveller's Joy decorate the wayside hedges from the end of summer and remain to decorate the bleak bare twigs in winter. They hang on even in the face of gale force winds. Yet their structure is that of wind blown seeds, to be carried in the air to a suitable site for germination. Each seed carries a long fine thread which is ornamented with many fine hairs. If these get wet they fold down so that they offer no resistance to the wind. But it surprised me that the dry seeds do not blow away and so I made a small study to elucidate the reason. I have pulled at the seeds with a pair of forceps and it can be quite difficult to pull them loose. Even in January it is possible to make the main stem bend more than half an inch before the seed becomes dislodged. Each seed is attached by a short peg fitting like a dowel rod into the base. This dowel rod dries slowly and becomes brittle and then the seed can be released. By the end of the winter they will dislodge. Then the warmer temperatures of spring will make the ground more receptive to a growing seed.
I was moved to look at this plant after reading over Christmas a classic French novel 'Jacquou le Croquant'. It is a tale of a 19th century peasant's revolt, set in the Dordogne thirty years after Napoleon, and yet the countryside still even after the Great Revolution was straddled with misery and arrogant landowners. In this book the clematis is called 'l'herbe aux gueux'. This translates as 'the plant of the tramps (the down and outs, the travellers, les va-nu-pieds)'. Gerard, the English herbalist, writing in 1597, says 'I have named it Traveller's Joy', from its habit if 'decking and adorning ways and hedges'. This is one of the few precise old records of giving of a popular name to a plant. So we can assume that there is no apparent connection between the French and English names. But a French reference says that in the middle ages beggars rubbed the plant on their skins to induce ulcers to arouse the pity of passers by. The plant is toxic but can be used with caution (it causes blisters) to relieve arthritis and it is used in homeopathy to relieve memory loss (so they say!).
The flower structure is similar to that of the buttercups. The fruits are just that bit different in having the long hairy appendage. The other oddity is in its method of climbing. If a leaf stalk touches a support as it grows, the cells on that side of the stalk shorten and those on the other side lengthen. So the leaf stalks can become extremely twisted. The stalks eventually become woody and the whole plant cannot be disentangled without secateurs.
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