Mature Clematis Montana pruning

I have a large mass of Clematis Montana coming into flower now. When these have died down I'm contemplating a big pruning exercise. The question is how much should I prune it ?

Looking underneath the mass there's a thick structure coming out of the ground then atop of all this is the large balloon like shape of the plant. Do I take Alan Titchmarsh's advice and prune this all down to the last pair of growing buds visible ? The picture accompanying AT's article shows a relatively young plant rather than something like this one which is quite old. I'm worried that I might kill it off if I prune too much, but I would like to get rid of this balloon like mass this year to make it a more healthy looking plant.

 

If it's huge, let it flower now, then, take the shears, hedge trimmer, or what ever to get out as much as that tangled mess underneath, there's no point in trying to do to carefully one stem at a time! take it back to the structure of older thicker stems and get rid of as much of the thatch as you can. It might need going over again a few weeks later to take out any more dead stems that are detatched.

Perhaps give it a feed and a nice mulch.... but they are tough enough to cope without.

They are tough and will recover quickly, there's a whole summer for them to put on new growth for next year's flowers

 

We were at Bodnant Gardens last week. They had to prune some of their C. montanas down to a couple of feet above the ground. the stems are 3 inches across. There were lots of new shoots coming from them, so you can be as ruthless as you like. Only thing to remember is that the more you remove the longer it will take for the plant to grow to flowering size again.

 

I gave my montana a very heavy prune back to the main stems in December. It is doing very nicely and survived the winter and there will be some flowers this year. Amazing, I thought it wouldn't survive.


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By chance, I was just reading the February RHS magazine today. We are several weeks behind the South - up here! And it said :-

"with Montana ...it can be regularly be trimmed after flowering, up until June. At that point you must stop pruning because it needs to make new growth and new wood to ripen and produce flowers for the following year."