Friends and passers by admire my wisteria and wonder at it's bounty. They think I have some magic formula, that it's dedication and a green thumb that leads to the budding. Sorry, I can't agree. I bought both my wisterias from a good nursery, both are grafted and both flowered within 12 months of purchase. I shaped them a bit, tied them in a bit and followed the rules in subsequent prunings, a bit. Mostly I treat them like affectionate thugs. They need to be controlled - I'm more concerned with restraint than flowering. I prune them through the year, aiming to send them off in the right directions and to keep my house in one piece. This year I am going to take out one established section, because I know that if I don't, soon it will steal the light completely at one window, and light isn't just necessary for plants. Call me greedy. I have provided some support. I am intolerant of the stranglehold these beasts demand on my drainpipes. I don't feed these monsters, and they still keep coming. My magic formula is simply to pay attention. If they didn't respond with flowers I'd get rid of them. In fact I'm looking at them both a bit sideways, because, grateful as I am, my attention has wandered. I'm looking at other wisterias.
I don't want the American variety - too shrubby. I don't want white, I want Japonese. I want, in a greedy 'want one' way, those ridiculously long racemes. I am the person with pretty bobbed hair gazing hungrily at Rapunzel tresses. I'm not going to get another wisteria, I am going to resist this nagging desire, because I've got two lovely specimens, and I know what the payoff is, and it's not all stand-back-and-gawp. I send cherished relatives up ladders (I don't do height) to sever shoots heading into the roof. I sweep up the flowers, I gather armfuls of prunings several times a year, and I duck when the seed pods that have escaped my notice pop, as though someone is shooting at me. In the autumn the leaves have to be gathered. And the wires have to be repaired and trellis put up to give my wandering friends somewhere to go. So I'm just enjoying thinking about it. Maybe that's the trick, that's why my wisteria flowers, it may have a vigorous habit, and be willing but it knows, deep down, that if it doesn't show me what it can do, I know another that can.
The wisteria growing at the front has darker flowers, and comes out a little later than it's rear seated compadre, as it's on a north facing wall. It's blooms are a slightly darker shade of purple, and keep company with some fabulous bearded irises. Like the wisteria these bearded lovelies don't mind being kept on a poor diet. Unlike the wisteria, every year I think they are not going to do the do. The flower buds steal up inside the leaf and pop out just when I've abandoned all hope. Then they offer several flowers at once, all imperial purple underwritten by a vibrant indigo with a narrow white throat and light golden beard. These irises are the best variety: inherited. They have a known provenance of three generations, straight down the female line from my grandmother. Their antecedents were planted in a row alongside a house in the south of France, baking nicely, and flowering enough to present a roadside purple haze that would have made any artist gasp and pick up a brush, or guitar, as appropriate. Continuing the ability to magic something out of nothing, more recent relatives offered their bounty while clinging to a fine coating of soil on the chalky Sussex south downs. Worship is now possible in Cricklewood, NW2.
