{"id":164,"date":"2009-08-24T04:44:44","date_gmt":"2009-08-24T12:44:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/garden\/?p=164"},"modified":"2015-11-24T07:32:59","modified_gmt":"2015-11-24T15:32:59","slug":"runaway-wisteria","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/runaway-wisteria\/","title":{"rendered":"Runaway Wisteria"},"content":{"rendered":"

RUNAWAY WISTERIA
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\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Many years ago, a well-meaning gardener planted wisteria on the lot next door.\u00a0 She probably intended for it to adorn the arch that sits on the property line.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Maybe during her tenure on the property, it did all of those things.\u00a0 Now it is out of control and it has become my problem.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The wisteria migrated from the arch and fence into the nearby privet hedge, making every attempt to strangle scores of individual privet shrubs.\u00a0 It reached out with its incredibly long stems and grasped tree trunks, climbing over twenty feet and drooping down from the helpless branches.\u00a0 It grew straight through narrow cracks between fence slats.\u00a0 The wisteria roots spread underground and sprouts popped up at regular intervals.\u00a0 These in turn developed into twining, grasping, climbing duplicates of the original plant.\u00a0 In some places wisteria offspring have vanquished everything green except the parent plant.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In spring all of that rampant wisteria flowers and if you close your eyes, you can imagine something lovely and graceful.\u00a0 When you open your eyes, you realize that one of the long stems has encircled your ankle.\u00a0 Controlling runaway wisteria is a full-time job.\u00a0
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The ship sailed for the Orient and came back with a Chinese vine that was eventually christened Wisteria sinensis. \u00a0The genus was named either for Daniel Wister or his probable nephew, Caspar Wistar (1761-1818), a prominent Philadelphia physician and botanist.\u00a0
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The most commonly grown species are Wisteria sinensis and Wisteria floribunda, or Japanese wisteria, which the Japanese call “Fuji”\u009d.\u00a0 There are also native American wisterias, including W. frutescens.\u00a0 A frutescens cultivar, ‘Amethyst Falls’, is sometimes available from catalog or online vendors.\u00a0 The native species has the advantage of the fragrant purple blossoms without the domineering tendencies of the Asian varieties.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Victorians, with their passion for vines, planted wisteria next to their houses and beside their pergolas.\u00a0 Their successors in the late Victorian\/early Edwardian Arts and Crafts movement cast away much Victoriana, but kept the wisteria.\u00a0 It has remained popular with gardeners all over the country, including the one who planted it on the lot next door to mine.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 When grown on a support, the vine can develop a thick, gnarled trunk, which is very striking on its own.\u00a0 Wisteria can also be trained as standard or tree-form plant.\u00a0 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.\u00a0
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The neighbors’ wisteria is a constant in my gardening life.\u00a0 I cut it back from the arch and the fence regularly.\u00a0 I root it out when it pops up behind my garage and I pull out yards of the green-leafed vines from the hedges.\u00a0 All of this is an exercise in temporary tidiness, because as soon as I put away the tools, the wisteria starts growing again.\u00a0 There is no ecologically sound, neighborly way to do away with it, so I just have to keep my sheers and wits sharp.\u00a0
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There are people who write to garden magazines or visit garden chat rooms to ask why their infant wisteria plants don’t grow.\u00a0 Most of them should be careful what they wish for.\u00a0 All wisteria plants should come with a disclaimer and pruning instructions.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Entertainer Mae West once said, “Good girls go to heaven; bad girls go everywhere.”\u009d\u00a0 My neighbors’ wisteria is clearly the queen of the bad girls and I think it is obvious where she is going.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

RUNAWAY WISTERIA \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Many years ago, a well-meaning gardener planted wisteria on the lot next door.\u00a0 She probably intended for it to adorn the arch that sits on the property line.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-interest","category-summer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1621,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164\/revisions\/1621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}