'horticultural how-to and woo-woo'
the source of organic gardening inspiration
margaret roach, head gardener
Home › Forums › Tree & Shrub Questions › Tree & Shrub Questions › Why oh why won’t the Wisteria bloom?
This topic contains 0 replies, has 1 voice, and was last updated by Anonymous 9 years, 2 months ago.
Seed-grown wisteria is notorious for testing a gardener’s patience, and even vegetatively propagated plants can be recalcitrant. Pruning hard is recommended, and some people try to shock the wisteria (threatening death!) by cutting into the root system partway around the plant…sort of in-place root pruning.
Martha Stewart told a funny (not) story about her wisteria standard at Turkey Hill, and how it wouldn’t bloom years ago. She was advised by an expert to hammer on the trunk to send the signal to the plant to bloom via some mechanism or other (whether hormones or terrorism I don’t know!) and she did so.
Voila! it bloomed the best it ever had…and then proceeded to drop dead.
One other tip: Don’t feed it Nitrogen.
You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
Welcome! I’m Margaret Roach, a leading garden writer for 25 years—at ‘Martha Stewart Living,’ ‘Newsday,’ and in three books. I host a public-radio podcast; I also lecture, plus hold tours at my 2.3-acre Hudson Valley (NY) Zone 5B garden, and always say no to chemicals and yes to great plants.
