RUNAWAY WISTERIA
Many years ago, a well-meaning gardener planted wisteria on the lot next door. She probably intended for it to adorn the arch that sits on the property line. She may have thought the long, purple, pea-like flower bunches would look lovely spiraling along the old wire cemetery fencing that flanked the arch. Maybe during her tenure on the property, it did all of those things. Now it is out of control and it has become my problem.
The wisteria migrated from the arch and fence into the nearby privet hedge, making every attempt to strangle scores of individual privet shrubs. It reached out with its incredibly long stems and grasped tree trunks, climbing over twenty feet and drooping down from the helpless branches. It grew straight through narrow cracks between fence slats. The wisteria roots spread underground and sprouts popped up at regular intervals. These in turn developed into twining, grasping, climbing duplicates of the original plant. In some places wisteria offspring have vanquished everything green except the parent plant.
In spring all of that rampant wisteria flowers and if you close your eyes, you can imagine something lovely and graceful. When you open your eyes, you realize that one of the long stems has encircled your ankle. Controlling runaway wisteria is a full-time job.
If you look for culprits in the pages of history books, you might be able to lay the whole problem at the feet of Daniel Wister or Wistar (1738-1805), a Philadelphia businessman from a prosperous Quaker family. According to some sources, Wister, together with Revolutionary War era financier Robert Morris and another businessman, Samuel Miles, underwrote the voyage of a cargo ship aptly named Empress of China. The ship sailed for the Orient and came back with a Chinese vine that was eventually christened Wisteria sinensis. The genus was named either for Daniel Wister or his probable nephew, Caspar Wistar (1761-1818), a prominent Philadelphia physician and botanist.
No matter which member of the Wister/Wistar family was honored with a green namesake, wisteria has been twining its way around the United States for a long time. The most commonly grown species are Wisteria sinensis and Wisteria floribunda, or Japanese wisteria, which the Japanese call “Fuji”. There are also native American wisterias, including W. frutescens. A frutescens cultivar, ‘Amethyst Falls’, is sometimes available from catalog or online vendors. The native species has the advantage of the fragrant purple blossoms without the domineering tendencies of the Asian varieties.
The Victorians, with their passion for vines, planted wisteria next to their houses and beside their pergolas. Their successors in the late Victorian/early Edwardian Arts and Crafts movement cast away much Victoriana, but kept the wisteria. It has remained popular with gardeners all over the country, including the one who planted it on the lot next door to mine.
When grown on a support, the vine can develop a thick, gnarled trunk, which is very striking on its own. Wisteria can also be trained as standard or tree-form plant. On the other hand, if it is left to its own devices and not pruned in a timely fashion, wisteria will go wherever it wants.
The neighbors’ wisteria is a constant in my gardening life. I cut it back from the arch and the fence regularly. I root it out when it pops up behind my garage and I pull out yards of the green-leafed vines from the hedges. All of this is an exercise in temporary tidiness, because as soon as I put away the tools, the wisteria starts growing again. There is no ecologically sound, neighborly way to do away with it, so I just have to keep my sheers and wits sharp.
There are people who write to garden magazines or visit garden chat rooms to ask why their infant wisteria plants don’t grow. Most of them should be careful what they wish for. All wisteria plants should come with a disclaimer and pruning instructions.
Entertainer Mae West once said, “Good girls go to heaven; bad girls go everywhere.” My neighbors’ wisteria is clearly the queen of the bad girls and I think it is obvious where she is going.