Vines and Climbers: Ok, so I'm a newbie..................., 1 by Clare_CA

Clare_CA wrote:
Purplepetunia, there is no chance that your wisteria will bloom after being cut to the ground -- at least not for two or three years. It would need at least two years to recover. Wisterias bloom on old wood so you would have to have nodes from the year before.

I too bought some bareroot wisterias from Home Depot a year or two ago. It was an unusually warm winter here so only one or two of my wisterias bloomed, and those only put out one bloom each. The wisterias that Home Depot sells are usually a few years old and should bloom right away. Additionally, they sell Cooke's Purple, which is an early bloomer and which will bloom when quite young.

Wisterias have nitrogen nodules attached to their roots so they don't need fertilizer. In Peter Vader's book "Wisterias, A Comprehensive Guide," he talks about full sun being a requirement for abundant development of flower buds. Also, he says, "Thirdly, if they are given lots of water and fertilizer, they may devote their energy to growth rather than to the development of flower buds so, as mentioned before, once a plant is established, it is best to do nothing to it unless it shows signs of distress. Finally, it is most important to prune correctly...as heavy pruning, particularly late in the growing season or in winter, is likely to remove those parts of the plant which would produce the next season's flowers."

I would highly recommend Peter Valder's book to anyone who is interested in growing wisterias. The pictures alone are worth the price of the book. I got mine from Amazon.com.

Also, if you have your wisterias growing in containers, then they do require more water during the growing season than ones planted in the ground, but they need to be kept dry during the dormant season.

Edited to fix spelling.

This message was edited May 3, 2004 4:56 PM