Wisteria can take beating

LEXINGTON, Ky. — Jackie Cooke planted a wisteria vine five years ago, and each spring, she dreamed of seeing the back of her house smothered in fragrant purple blooms.

She waited and waited. No luck. Until this year.

And wow! It’s a knockout. The vine climbed to a second-floor deck and exploded over the railing in a purple cloud of flowers.

“I was getting ready to dig it up because I didn’t think it would happen,” said Cooke, of Lexington, Ky. Her only reason for hesitating was that the wisteria was a Mother’s Day gift from her husband, Glenn.

Cooke attributes the blooms to garden advice passed along by an acquaintance, who said hitting the trunk of the vine with a baseball bat would cause it to bloom.

More about wisteria abuse in a minute.

Several years ago, I asked William Fountain, a horticulture professor at the University of Kentucky who specializes in woody plants, why it’s so hard to get wisteria to bloom. With seed-grown wisteria, it is a maturity factor, Fountain said.

It can sometimes take 15 years or longer for wisteria to bloom. For that reason, he said, make sure you buy wisteria grown from a cutting or grafted onto old root stock. If the hang tag is not clear on this point, ask a sales assistant.

Back to abusing wisteria with a baseball bat or whatever else you have at hand: Fountain said severely root-pruning wisteria with a shovel can sometimes put the plant under enough stress to shock it out of its juvenile state and into maturity.

Other people have their own methods of putting wisteria into a state of shock. Jonathan Berry’s wisteria was beautiful this spring. It has bloomed before, but the vine is so aggressive, Berry runs over parts of it with the lawn mower in the summer. He has chopped branches back unmercifully in the 20 years that he and his wife have lived in Lexington.

“You have to keep it cut back, or its branches reach clear out over to the house,” Berry said.