Hi there welcome to Avery Gardens. One of the best flowers at this time of year has got to be Wisteria. We’ve got a beautiful Wisteria here growing up against the west side of this house and it’s really thriving.
So we’re in early May now and so these beautiful fountains of flower from this Wisteria beginning to really come into their own. It’s swarmed with bees I can hear them buzzing now and I’m enveloped in this beautiful sweet fragrance which is coming off all these hundreds of flower buds.
Structural Pruning
Now this particular Wisteria is at least 100 years old it’s been growing here for years and we’ve been looking after this one now for about two years and we’ve been doing a lot of pruning and a lot of structural work to it because over the years these large wooden stems they begin to get damaged. Some begin to die back and so the shrub begins to lose its vitality a little bit and so we been going in there.
Pruning in February
There’s two main times to prune Wisteria, in February just before the buds begin to come out that’s more structural pruning as I said cutting out older crossing branches the tendrils that grew from last year that you miss that would have been easier to see because the leaves and the flowers are off the shrub.
So, in February we got a ladder on this and we pruned it all back to a few buds kind of four or five buds of the previous year’s growth.
Winter pruning is quite laborious but it’s really worth doing because this is the reward you get. There’s no dead branches hiding the flowers, all of the flowers are really open to light and open to air and they’re not competing with you know a dense cluster of branches so it’s really at its best.
So, we’ll leave this now enjoy the flowers enjoy the fragrance you’ll see a lot of these wisteria around as you walk around this time of year and when the sun’s out like it is now it’s fantastic.
Pruning In July
We’re pruning again late June into July once the flowers go over in a 2 or 3 weeks time the shrub will begin to grow lots of tendrils so you can see the buds beginning to come out here these will throw up long climbing tendrils and then kind of July time we’ll prune these back to four or five buds to keep the framework tight to the wall because it can very quickly creep and get out of control.
Year Round Maintenance
So it’s just a case of two or three times a year maintaining it just so the structure of the shrub is at its best and so hopefully this shrub will have a few more years left in it and the one benefit of having the much cooler and wetter weather we’ve been having this year is that a lot of spring flowering shrubs are carrying on deep into the spring.
Normally if it’s hot or even windy a lot of the early flowering shrubs kind of go over with a bit of a whimper but because we’ve had such cool conditions and wet conditions these earlier flowering shrubs are really drawing up all that moisture now and now we’ve having a bit of a warm spell everything is really popping at its best.
So, it’s the best time of year in my opinion to get out into the garden really enjoy the fragrances and colours of springtime.
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