Flowers - Wisteria

Wisteria is a perennial, but behaves differently to the other perennials in my garden. It loses leaves in winter, but don't die back completely. This makes it more like a bush or shrub, but since the point of wisteria is its flowers, I have put it there as well.

I bought this as a plant in a pot, and I suspect that it's not a very good variety, as the leaves start coming out at the same time as the flowers, which tends to hide the flowers.

I bought this after seeing a beautiful wisteria on holiday, in Exeter, I think it was. I was then told that wisteria takes seven years before flowering for the last time, so I defiantly said "Well, I like the leaves!" It must have been about seven years to the first flower bud (which puzzled me - I didn't know what it was!) and it happened after I'd worked out how to prune it.

Wisteria is a very vigorous plant, and needs a lot of controlling! I trained it over the path, to make an arch, which turned out to be a good idea, as the flowers hang down above our heads. However, the stems making the arch drooped downwards, so they hit our heads! So we put in some serious wooden beams to keep it up. While training the branches to make the arch, I didn't do much pruning (and there were no flowers!), but I read somewhere that wisteria should be pruned hard, so I did that, and the first flowers appeared the next year. (Might have been a coincidence...) The plant puts out lots of long, thin branches all the time in the summer, and I snap off every single one. It's one of the main summer jobs! Still, the blossom is worth it.

The flower buds are much larger than the leaf buds. This is a way of working out if it will flower this year!

The last photo shows the wisteria in winter.

Click on photos for large version.