Watch it grow! Wisteria races up trellis at Olympic pace!

Our skinny leader is growing skyward at a blistering pace. Hai Dang
(a newspaperman with a degree in biology from the U of M)
said if we just cut it back to almost nothing, it would thrive. It has.

We've had good luck with a couple of wisteria vines on our back deck over the past eight years. So when our friend Randy planted one to cover his gazebo in his Los Angeles back yard this spring, we were inspired to start another planting on our front deck pergola.
We transplanted a big pot of wisteria in May. It was a promising specimen, all bunched up about three feet high, clinging to some support sticks. Paid $35 for it at Minnesota Valley Garden near here. Believe it is the Japanese version.
We gave it a fair opportunity to establish itself, but it just sort of galumped along for the first month or two. Then family friend Hai Dang suggested that we prune off everything but a single dominant leader. This was hard to do, cutting off all that expensive foliage and woody growth, but we did. Snip, snip, snip, we left nothing but one pathetic stem.
Our wisteria is off to the races.

Fifteen month-old Emmy K. took early steps among the
wisteria growing crazy wild on the back deck in 2007.
The cracks between boards surprised her
as she looked down at her baby feet.

We can barely keep up with installing new pig-fence trellis, it is ten feet tall now, gaining about three inches a day, galloping toward the top of our 26 foot high gazebo on the southwest corner. Eventually we will allow it to branch out, fill out, trimming out any suckers, allowing only dominant branching. This is an entirely different approach to our wisteria husbandry. The one in the backyard has been allowed the freedom to grow like topsy and it has, throwing out shoots almost daily, tough to control. It's beautiful, but most of its energy goes into running off in all different directions, not producing blooms, just a mass of foliage offering good privacy to the back deck.
Our new wisteria display will be the result of disciplined, controlled cultivation. A single big trunk with organized branches. Let's see what works.