MAY: Wisteria

I don’t recall seeing a wisteria growing up in the Philippines, although now I can see that they do grow in the tropics but not that common. My mother probably discovered wisterias when she moved to the US over 30 years ago. But she has never planted one. She did live in a wooden house in San Jose and she had something against creeper vine attaching to a house – ‘unlucky’ or something. A more practical reason probably is that the walls were made of wood and any creeping vine would damage that. She did get my late sister to plant it as she had a more solid house. It’s still there and she still berates my brother-in-law for not pruning it ‘properly’.

My love of wisteria came from my mother when she visited Switzerland the year I moved here. She was just raving about the massive wisteria everywhere you look, which of course made me look and I promptly fell in love with them!

Now I go around photographing and raving about wisterias eliciting eyerolls from my boys. Having said that, they would photograph wisterias they had seen and would send them to me in our family chat! Sweet.

Wisteria is also known by a variant spelling of the genus in which species were formerly placed, Glycine. Hence they are called Glycine in French and Glyzinie in German.

Wisterias are one of the most spectacular spring-blooming perennials! It is a genus of flowering pea family Fabaceae Leguminosae. There are about 4 species —but the two most popular here are the Chinese (Wisteria sinensis) and Japanese (Wisteria frutescens) varieties – both purple. It also comes in white, lilac and pink colour. Wisterias are also native to Korea, Vietnam, southern Canada, the Eastern United States, and north of Iran. The flowers drop (called racemes) with the Japanese variety having the longest – up to 90 centimeters. They fill the air with a headily sweet musky scent. Gorgeous.

I don’t have a wisteria in my garden. My husband says there is no room and he won’t have it creeping on the walls to reach my target balcony. I might just surreptitiously plant one and feign ignorance. My take on the Guerilla Gardening movement. But not sure I’ll get away with that. So I officially have WISTERIASIS – wisteria envy! I have even rehearsed my German incase a homeowner challenges me for loitering too long outside their houses - “Sie haben die schönsten Glyzinien!”

All photos here are within a 2km radius of my house.

Although not in Switzerland, I leave you with a photo of the largest wisteria (fuji in Japanese) in Ashikaga Flower Park, Japan. It dates back to 1870 and covers the 1,990 square meters. It’s not the biggest in the world. The Sierra Madre Wisteria in California holds that record but it looks ‘less managed’ than Ashikaga’s. Impressed yet by this mighty flower?

SLIMHANNYA, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons