I planted a Wisteria tree 4 years ago, and it’s never bloomed for me once! It leafs out like crazy, and borderline TOO crazy...but still not one flower?

What kind of wisteria is it? Both my Chinese and Japanese wisteria ‘trees’ took 5 years before they did their first spring bloom. Patience.... and prune like heck to promote development of flowering wood! My Chinese one started producing secondary summer flowers 7-10 days after a pruning cut within its first year, so I was sure that it was going to flower fully eventually! The Japanese one has never produced the secondary summer flowers. I think the main reason that a lot of wisterias don’t bloom is a lack of pruning (assuming you’re not trying to grow a seed-grown plant..... Can you see a graft-union at the base?) When the wisterias are in peak growth, pruning back the new whippy growth is almost a daily event here!

Oh I had no idea! I should be pruning it all the time? This is great to know!! I’m not sure exactly whether Chinese or Japanese version, but I know I bought it from those scam like websites? Where you get 20 trees for like $30 lol...I was a rookie and broke and needed stuff for my yard lol..but I do know they advertised it as a ‘blue’ wisteria? Let me see if I can find the one online and I’ll post the link

Ok so I guess it’s chinese...this is the one I have...I do see the trunk, but it’s only about 2.5’-3’ tall? Well the trunk alone is that high...add in the top (foliage) and it’s maybe 5’? https://www.naturehills.com/blue-chinese-wisteria

That site certainly contains lots of sales babble - but even it talks about pruning right away.... Mind you, I never do the rather fussy pruning that is the 'proper' way to do it - far too much detail for me! This link should take you to part of my garden maintenance manual - scroll about halfway down the front garden section until you get to the section called 'Moat bed' which is where the wisterias are. You can read the details there re what we do for pruning etc. I only update the manual once a year (in Jan.-Feb.) so the non-blooming pictures in this thread will only appear after I update it in early 2019.... Our Chinese one (no variety given, just 'blue' much like yours although I bought it at a local garden center) was planted in 2000. The Japanese one was planted around 2007.

eta - there's nothing special about a wisteria being a tree - any wisteria vine can be converted to a tree simply by supporting it upright and pruning to to the shape you want. Both my 'trees' started out as vines. So the trunk height can be whatever you want it to be....

Thanks for all of the useful information, I’m going to check out that link now!

This year, not only my wisteria, but my tall bearded and arilbred iris, crocuses, and quamash failed to bloom...in some cases, an aborted dead bloom was produced. I blame the on-off cold weather causing things to start to grow then get deep-frozen. I guess we should be lucky that most things lived through it (not all).

Thanks for those additional pictures and comments! That’s all very reassuring actually - we were afraid that the very extensive pruning we did in 2016 might have done some permanent damage, but realizing that other wisterias have suffered in the same way as ours this winter/spring gives us hope that next year might produce a normal spring flowering again if the weather cooperates!

The wisteria was blooming like crazy here at the beginning of may, it must be your climate.

I'm still waiting on my Wisteria to bloom, three years in. I have Blue Moon and it's not as aggressive as the Chinese Wisteria so that's probably why.

Here in Colorado, Wisteria usually only blooms every third year or so, due to the weather fluctuations most springs.

Woodyoak this is my tree, can you tell me what exactly I should prune please? I’m much better with visuals lol

Faith - we definitely have good years and bad years with the wisteria, but this has been the only year since each of them started blooming that there has been virtually no bloom at all!

Nessdizzle - Good Heavens! I would prune that thing like mad! It probably also needs a support post or two. The dense foliage can act like a sail on windy days. The trunk remains flexible even when it gets thicker than the one you have. In a high wind, the tree might fall over - but the trunk bends, not breaks. In that link I gave you, you can see pictures of when our Japanese one blew over a few years ago.... We ended up putting angle-iron posts on either side, running tie rods between them and then tied the trunk to the tie rods. I remember reading an RHS article on wisterias that said most Victorian-era wisteria trees still alive have iron rods at the center of their trunks - support rods that the trees grew around and are now inside the tree trunk - taking a chainsaw to one of those to take it down could be very hazardous!

I took one of your pictures and drew lines to show where I'd start pruning - see below. I'd start by taking it back to a couple of stems, then take off masses of the foliage and stems so you can see what you have under there! Then start thinking of what you want it to look like and refine your pruning to start creating the shape you want. Our Chinese one is rather roughly shaped, aiming for a fairly upright tree with lots of branches to show off the flowers - which largely bloom as somewhat short racemes before the leaves emerge, so being branched fairly low gives flowers over a larger area of the tree. The Japanese one, on the other hand, flowers mainly after the leaves emerge and has longer flower racemes, so it displays best with no branching lower down so the flowers dangle free from above - although we always need to prune off some foliage to display the flowers. Almost all of the summer growth gets cut back regularly to maintain the shape we want - for the Japanese one, imagine an umbrella with a fringe of flowers hanging down... :-) Given how fast wisterias grow, you have lots of chances to adjust the shape if you don't like your first attempt(s) at pruning!

Be bold! Have fun! The more pruning you do, the more flowers you get is our experience....

Thank you , I’ll get out the pruners tomorrow!

I posted that pruning picture in a bit of a rush this morning before heading out for the day.... I think some clarification is in order :-)

Depending on what size screen you're using to look at the picture, it might look like I was suggesting cutting off both sides of the V at the top of the trunk! If you zoom in you'll see I was suggesting to cut off the thinner stems emerging from the V stems.... For my tastes and from a practical perspective, that trunk (the straight bit below the V) is too short! The first thing I'd want to do is make it taller.

I think the easiest way to do that would be to see if the two arms of the V are flexible enough that you could wrap them around each other and train them upright with a sturdy support post (angle iron...?) to raise the height of the trunk to, say, at least 4'. Then prune to encourage more horizontal branches above - and a bit below - that level. Chinese wisterias twine counterclockwise, so if you try to twine the stems together, twine them counterclockwise. They do not 'strangle' themselves when they twine together - the two stems ultimately merge and form an interesting twisted trunk! This is an old picture but it shows what counterclockwise means and shows a relatively young growth wrapping around a slightly older trunk:

Think about how tall you want the tree to get. We use a long-arm pruner from Lee Valley Tools to prune our wisterias. The Chinese tree had got to about 8-10' by 2016 - which looked good but was getting out of reach of the pruners, especially on the side facing the road as DH had to stand on the slope of the ditch to prune there (which meant he was standing below the tree, making the tree effectively taller!) So we ended up doing a hard prune that took off the top 2-3'. We are now aiming to keep it to 6-7' tall.

Yeah I was gonna say around 6’ would be good for me...thank you for your very thorough walk thru, it’s helped me tremendously =)