wisteria – Agnes Ashe

So that was May 2022

I don’t know about you, but I seemed to have been waiting and waiting for the appearance of flowers this year. Maybe it’s because there’s been so much bad news around that the need for garden beauty has been more pressing. Finally, fat, colourful buds appeared.

Tight buds of aquilegias and closed tulips.

As my own backyard isn’t particularly sunny I resorted to walking over to the local park. However, the most stunning display wasn’t in the park, but this delightful wisteria and front garden planting at 16, Fonnereau Road, Ipswich. The bold, mid-nineteenth century architecture of this Grade II listed building is complimented and softened by the delicate palette of the flowers and foliage.

Wisteria sinensis at 16, Fonnereau Road.

In my own back garden the clematis montana ‘Rubens’ has grown to the top of the fence at last and by early May the first flowers bloomed.

However, again the most stunning wall/fence treatment was not at my place nor even in the park, but this gorgeous ceanothus arboreus ‘Trewithin Blue’ topping the fence on a back garden running along High Street, Ipswich.

Now, really I should not complain as by mid May I had plenty of flowering going on in the yard, but it was nearly all white. Self-seeded white honesty was in every bed. I had noticed it had seeded prolifically, but couldn’t bring my self to remove any.

White honesty. Lunaria. annua var. albiflora

There was a charming, fairytale quality with all the shimmering white for about a week, before the flowers began to fade. Fortunately, by then tulips in pots were coming into full bloom and

then my favourites for this time of year, the aquilegias, now too mostly self-seeded, opened into all their intriguing colour combinations.

Towards the end of the month a small clump of alliums showed off their globes of tiny star-like flowers despite my earlier stupidity of leaving a heavy pot on top of their foliage.

And, that’s it we’ve reached June and May 2022 is now history. But before I go, I think I’d like to award first prize for the most over-the-top May display to clematis ‘Nelly Moser’. Not the most subtle of the Group 2 clematis, but it’s hanging on in there despite slugs, snails, unreliable watering and all the various fungi that thrive in the still, damp air of a less than sunny backyard.

A Little Wisteria Appropriation

May-blooms-arrangement Some of you may remember seeing photos from my old garden of the white Japanese wisteria that I trained over a pergola. I originally bought it as a grafted specimen and it flowered from the first year, but it really got into its stride around about its fifth year. By the time I left that garden to a new custodian the wisteria was 11 years in place and blooming spectacularly every May. It also provided a canopy of green shade for all those long hot days of summer!

Drooping white Wisteria floribunda (Japanese Wisteria) flower arrangement and my one attempt at stained glass behind.

I have moved from the outskirts of city living back to urban life proper and no longer have the space for such a rampant plant in my backyard. Well, that’s not entirely true, but I need the sunny area for some fruit as well as flowers.

White-flowers-wisteria However, despite my ‘restricted space’ predicament, I am not entirely starved of this beautiful, May blooming flower as from the bedroom window I can see the charming Chinese wisteria decorating my next-door neighbour’s pergola.

Have you noticed? – The return of black backgrounds

Flower-arrangement-black-background

Recently I’ve spied quite a few photographs of flowers and flower arrangements featuring very dark or black backgrounds. This is not new in the depiction of flowers, but it is a swerve away from the de rigueur of the ‘computer white’ backgrounds so prevalent across the online world.

Greens-more-dramatic-against-dark-background

Pale colours are contrasted and highlighted by a dark background and interestingly the foliage greens appear more striking.

Flowers-like-Dutch-still-life

Naturally, this has all been explored before during the Dutch Golden Age. Inventive Dutch 17th-century artists created beautiful, dramatic flower paintings against dark or black backgrounds. Currently, there’s an extremely gifted contemporary photographer, Paulette Tavormina also working in this area producing some fascinating images – well worth a look.

Group of Flowers - Willem van Aelst — Group of Flowers – Willem van Aelst (1627 – after 1687) Oil on Canvas. The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK.

Wisteria – a scented affair too

Wisteria floribunda (Japanese wisteria) comes out a little later than the classic mauve Chinese wisteria, but it’s well worth the wait. It also has a rich heady scent particularly noticeable at dusk.

Some of the white racemes are 18 inches long and the whole display is humming with bees.

It is a fleeting display though as before the last buds at the bottom of each raceme are open the pea-like flowers at the top are already dropping.

Wisteria floribunda 25 May 2015 — Wisteria floribunda
25 May 2015

Time to prune

If you want the above in early summer then now’s the time to get up the ladder and prune the wisteria. Here we start with a big tangle.

Trace the long wippy growth from last summer back towards the main framework of the plant. Make an angled cut, pruning back to a couple of fat buds leaving a spur of about three or four inches.

A couple of hours later and the winter prune is done. Depending on your soil you may want to beef up last autumn’s mulch with some light, garden compost to promote spring growth. Now leave the rest to nature and hopefully it will develop like this.

Wisteria floribunda after its winter prune.

Wisteria – A Lesson in Delayed Gratification

Winter gardening even in East Anglia can be a chilly affair, but the wisteria’s annual winter prune is an essential task I usually tackle in February. But last Boxing Day it felt quite balmy in my back garden so before I knew it I was up the ladder and cutting away.

Wisteria in bud — Full of potential – fat buds of wisteria floribunda in late April.

Now – I have been a bit nervous through this recent long, cold spring that I had cut too soon, but as our Victorian forebears insisted patience is a virtue and this time it has been rewarded with this glorious display.

White wisteria floribunda — View from my kitchen window.

A photograph only gives an approximation of the experience of sitting under this Japanese wisteria as on a warm evening its rich, velvety, slightly spicy fragrance hangs all around complementing the visual delight. Since the end of April I have tracked the development of this early summer show-off.