RE: Wisteria training & snags.... Need some help here...

That's a great story, hiding in the wisteria to read. I used to go off and
hide with my books too, alas I never had a neat place like that to hide in.
That's wonderful. 

Cyndi 


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-gardenchat@hort.net [o*@hort.net] On Behalf
Of Aplfgcnys@aol.com
Sent: Friday, January 06, 2006 6:37 PM
To: gardenchat@hort.net
Subject: Re: [CHAT] Wisteria training & snags.... Need some help here...

I grew up in a house in the Florida Panhandle that had  a wisteria
screen around the corner of the porch (my grandfather called it a
veranda).  The wisteria grew on a support made of lead pipes -
I guess maybe 2" pipes.  I don't know how long the vine had been
there, but it was fully grown as long as I can remember.  As a child
I would climb from the porch into the vine for a place to hide and
read books - much to the distress of my grandmother because 
wisteria sap made stains on my clothes.  I don't know which
kind of wisteria it was - beautiful fragrant lavender blooms -  but
this must have been planted in the early years of the last century.
I remember that once my grandfather measured the growth of the
vine along the ground under the house (Florida houses in those 
days were built up on piers with a two-or-three-foot airspace
beneath as a kind of passive air-conditioning).  The vine grew
from one side of the house to the other - perhaps forty feet - in
ten days.  He would have a man come every spring and do major
pruning - take off a wagon-load of growth.  He said that was
necessary to make it bloom - and it must have worked, for the
bloom was heavy each year.
Auralie

In a message dated 01/06/2006 8:02:34 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
zsanders@midsouth.rr.com writes:

>I was looking at the White Flower Farm site where they tell you never to
> remove the stake. I'm sure when trained right it would stand up under 
> normal
> conditions, but what happens in weather?
> I've seen a really big wisteria, in fact they claim it is the biggest in 
> the
> world, in Sierra Madre. Here's a link:
> http://www.sierramadrenews.net/wistaria.htm
> This vine did collapse a house. They let the public in to see it in bloom
> once a year. It's pretty impressive to walk underneath and it smells
> wonderful.
> Anyway what have you got to lose, plant your wisteria, train it up the 
> tree
> and see what happens, even if the tree trunk falls over chances are the 
> vine
> will make it and then you can decide whether to build an arbor underneath
> it. You'll be doing some pruning every year though!
>
> Cyndi

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