Um, AfterMidnight has hit the nail on the head, I think. Last year was a storming year for fruit of all kinds.....but this year, combined with a weird winter lacking in winter chill, we are seeing apples with hugely reduced fruit set, cherries which will drop the stunted crop over the next week or so, and redcurrants with no fruit at all. This is called biennial bearing....and often happens as trees and shrubs get older (although some varieties such as Cox pippin apples, have an innate tendency to have good years and bad years). Legumes, like laburnum and brooms are very much affected by this trait so don't fret, the tree looks perfectly healthy, this is just a natural hiatus.

Thyme - The American wisterias bloom on 'new wood' while the Chinese and Japanese ones bloom on mature flowering spurs on 'old wood'. That's why the American ones start blooming right away. It takes a few years - and proper pruning - to develop the flowering spurs for the Chinese and Japanese ones. My experience has been that the Chinese one developed the flowering spurs quickly and easily, probably partly because it seems somewhat inclined to produce summer flowers on new growth if it has been pruned, and partly because it is a grafted plant. The Japanese ones don't have that summer flowering ability I gather. My Japanese one actually has had visible flowering spurs for several years now so it appears to be just a matter of getting it mature enough. Last week we went to the nearby Royal Botanical Gardens to take a close look at their Japanese ones to see if I could determine exactly which buds are flwering ones. From what I could see, the flowers appear to arise somewhat differently than the Chinese ones since they are accompanied by a burst of leaf growths; the flower raceme is in the center of it all. Seeing the the blooming Japanese ones at RBG made me worried that I might have been accidently pruning off the emerging raceme, thinking it was whippy new leaf growth! So it's hands-off pruning the new growth on the Japanese one for awhile :-) On the Chinese one, it is very clear which buds are the flowers long before any visible growth appears. The Chinese one produces flowerbuds separate from the leaves, which don't start appearing until after the flowerbuds start extending. The ease of identifying flowering growth will no doubt also be true for the Japanese one once I've seen it flower for the first time :-) My wisteria book describes the American ones scent a 'musk'. Like most fragrant plants, the scent is strongest on the Chinese one in early morning and evening. In mid-day you almost have to have your nose in the flowers to really get a good whiff of the scent. I don't know if that will be true for yours as well or not. Grafted Chinese or Japanese wisteria are best to ensure relatively quick blooming because grafted plants usually/should mean it was started from a plant that had already flowered - i.e. is mature. My Chinese one is grafted - there's an obvious graft-union. I suspect the Japanese one is a rooted cutting as I see no graft-union. So it was probably not flowering wood. But the variety, 'Lawrence', is known for its hardiness and being an early and prolific bloomer, so I shouldn't have to wait too much longer. I think there's much nonsense repeated about such things as root pruning and otherwise abusing your wisteria. All they need is proper and diligent pruning of new growth - and time to mature. And a lot of the detailed 'proper' pruning instuctions you find make it too complicated and people tend to give up and let them run amok, which is a big mistake and the main reason they...

Annie - first you need to be sure that what you have is a Chinese wisteria and not a Japanese one. Chinese ones bloom quite easily on new wood in summer but the Japanese ones, I gather, do not. My Japanese one is still a baby (3 years old) and has not yet bloomed in spring or any other time. The Chinese one in the picture is 9 or 10 (I keep forgetting if I planted it in 2000 or 2001...) It has produced summer blooms since the summer after it was planted. It took 5 years to do a spectacular spring bloom for the first time. Some summer bloom is natural even if you do nothing, particularly on older vines. But what I noticed is that everytime you prune back one of the whippy, curly new growths, about 10-14 days later a flower bud appears near where you cut it off. So it's not related to temperature or light or anything light that I think. The summer bloom started about 10 days ago and will continue into mid-late August. Because I want my wisteria to be a tree - big shrub really... - I cut off the new growths as they appear to control size and shape. A Chinese neighbour leaves all the growths long until the fall and then cuts them off and shapes the tree. That's the 'proper' way to do it and she has a much neater tree than mine. But mine flowers a lot more, both spring and summer. I think that's because my way forces the tree to produce a lot more new growth which, once pruned back, becomes flowering wood for this summer as well as next spring. We need to do some shaping on the wisteria - it needs a substantial pruning after the leaves fall and we can see what's what. It is so dense that the foliage acts as a sail. It was whipping around in the wind earlier this month and broke one of the metal supports. So we need to reduce it in size and install a sturdier supplemental support.

For anyone growing Chinese wisteria - are you getting a good summer re-bloom this year? We had a very bad winter here that killed all the spring flower-buds but it is now doing a very nice summer re-bloom. It's actually been a few years since we got a decent summer show from it! Some pictures: Yesterday from the road: (The messy stems at the base are a Henryi clematis companion which seems to have largely died out over the winter!) Today looking at the other side from the front porch: