I’ve got a huge honkin’ wisteria growing up the corner of my porch. The sucker’s really hard to control – I spend all summer cutting it back, cutting it back, cutting it back – and for a while I had a raccoon living in the porch roof, it having used the wisteria as its own personal stairway to heaven.
I periodically think about taking it down. Today I remembered why I don’t want to – it’s in full, extremely fragrant bloom. It’s been extremely warm the last couple of days, so the front door is open, and I’m sitting in the middle of the house (25 feet or so from the front door) smelling the lovely smell.
I SO want to get a wisteria standard going. We have nothing around that’s strong enough to let it climb, so just doing the usual viney thing isn’t going to work. But we have to get rid of the Evil Walnut Tree first…
We are in Indiana, and my mother’s Wisteria is in full bloom, too. It’s a lovely smell! She’s got Lilacs out there, along with the Wisteria.
She does the same as you…sits in the house with the windows open, and the smell wafts into the house on the breeze. Beats the hell out of air freshners!
I’m so sad. I just helped a friend landscape her new house, inluding a wisteria growing up an ancient huge cedar, but her boyfriend and I finally reached an impasse and we have parted ways. I’m not likely to get to see it mature.
I’ll have to drive by every couple of years. The overall theme (wisteria notwithstanding) was temperate tropical, with gunnera, big stands of giant elephant ears, and groves of pink bananas.
I was surprised to discover I have a wisteria in my yard. On the side fence, there are all kinds of vines - one I know is a trumpet vine, and there’s tons of Virginia creeper.
10-4 on that! It’s just a (much) prettier form of kudzu around here. Another tree strangling vine, albeit with personality. When I was growing up there was a one acre plus stand of wisteria in the woods nearby that had grown so thick between trees that we could walk across the top of it. We spent hours per day each summer on our arborial walkway.
There is such a thing as non-invasive native wisteria, although I’m not sure I’ve actually ever seen any outside of a catalog. The kind you see everywhere is the Japanese version, and indeed it is just like kudzu. I can’t believe people in other parts of the country baby and pet it and hope one day it might bloom - here you better sleep with a knife under your pillow if you’ve got it in your yard.
So lucky! I have wanted a wisteria since I was a kid. (My Grandma turned me into a gardening addict when I was a tiny child!) Now that I live here, I am out of luck, I have to get my wisteria, and many other plants, jones fixed by looking at photos. sniff
I do have a lilac and a crabapple, I don’t know how long it will take before they bloom, but I keep checking them every Spring!
twickster, I vote that this, along with baby and pet threads, ought to require photos. Anyone with me?
Incidentally, it is still snowing here almost every day. I have some bulbs up and other perrenials are showing signs of life, but I know that it is Spring in the rest of the States.
Only yesterday I detoured from my usual route home to check on two of my favorite plant spectacles: the white azaleas at the Penn biopond, and the porch-covering wisterias on 42nd Street. The azaleas are still in bud, but that’s fine, they’ll open soon; meanwhile the turtles, 10 of them, were basking their little heads off, and the violets were in full purple glory. Meanwhile the wisterias were just starting to open; in full bloom, they cover the house’s porch like a curtain and can be smelled from the street if the breeze is right. The same house has a huge red azalea in the side yard, longer than a VW bus and over 5 feet tall.
Things like huge wisterias are one of the advantages of living in an older neighborhood. These things take time to grow.
I am so jealous! We have wiseria vines, but every year it’s a battle to control it and it NEVER blooms - ever! So we just get a really vicious vine that crawls up the telephone pole and we hate every minute of it. But I love wiseria blooms!
