Species · Flowering trees like quince and crab apple
Japanese wisteria
Wisteria floribunda
Japanese wisteria is grown for its long, hanging racemes of fragrant purple flowers in spring, a display that takes real patience to establish on a young plant and needs hard summer pruning every year to maintain. It is a vigorous vine at heart, trained onto a trunk-like structure rather than naturally forming one.
Care at a glance
- Watering
- Check daily in growing season; wisteria drinks heavily while in leaf. Roughly every 2 days in spring, 1 in summer, 2 in autumn and 5 in winter.
- Light
- Full sun.
- Winter
- Hardy once established; flowers best after a cold winter. Protect it when the forecast drops below -18 °C.
- Feeding
- Every 21 days, Jun to Sep, paused in the hottest weeks.
- Repotting
- Every 2 to 3 years, as buds swell, in Mar.
- Growth
- Fast growing. Hardy in zones 5 to 9.
The work calendar
| Work | JJan | FFeb | MMar | AApr | MMay | JJun | JJul | AAug | SSep | OOct | NNov | DDec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Prune | Jun | Jul | Dec | |||||||||
| Wire | Jan | Nov | Dec | |||||||||
| Pinch | May | Jun | Jul |