Nope, you'll have blooms the first year on some or all of them... just not buckets and buckets of blooms. I just planted my clems late this past season at this house and I had blooms on many of them and even rebloom on a few. If you plant in spring, you will have a better performance than I did. However, you probably will not see the lushness in growth that we get here in the South on many other plants during that first year. Good growth... yes. Lush growth... no. That will come a year or so later.
It's true that a clem can take a few years to reach it's first bloom, but that's the time from propagation. What a lot of people don't realize is that a 3-1/2" clem from a reputable grower is already two years old. It takes a long time for the root system to develop to a viable size in a clem... but once it reaches that stage, it takes off. Clems are true to the old saying, "First year it sleeps, second year it creeps, third year it leaps."
