Do you know the provenance of your wisteria? Is it a named cultivar or do you think it might be an unnamed seedling? Wisteria can take 10 - 15 years to flower from seed and even then you are not certain of getting good quality blooms. If you really want one it's probably best to buy a good cultivar of known provenance.

Have you had a frost since the buds started to expand? That would do it...!

I jokingly told my husband after sifting thru a new White Flower Farm catalog that he could get me the above named wisteria as a 3 yr old in tree standard form for $165 for my mother's day present. To my surprise he said I should by myself a nice card too- so he could sign it! I did take notes on how to do a wisteria in this form from GW and then had my cutting die after transplant this spring- so it lived one yr then died- not sure why. I thought these were tough. It was a cutting off a plant that has succeeded in this area for over 30 yrs. I figure this company would come with a money back guarentee so what the heck. How long do these bloom in zone 5? ---Assuming it can live here. --- catalog says zone 5-8 I'm not into plants that only bloom for short periods. Thx:) Karen

Hmm.... It looks like either there is little interest in these fascinating plants - or you're bored by more wisteria pictures from me! :-) I was hoping someone else with a Chinese wisteria - or someone who has seen one flowering in their neighbourhood - might chime in regarding their experience with summer flowers on them.... Wisterias are certainly a bit of work re pruning and such, but they are beautiful and fascinating plants. We are still learning things about them after having them in the garden for almost 20 years. The summer flowers still involve a bit of mystery for us. Some years we get a lot and some years not very many even though we prune the new growth - which seems to provoke the flowers - every year. Not all pruning of new growth generates flowers, so we're not sure why sometimes it happens but not other times. Summers after a bad winter that killed a lot of flowerbuds seem to result in more summer flowers - which seems logical if the vine is trying to replace lost flowering wood. The summer flowers also look a bit different than the spring flowers but it's hard to precisely define the difference :-) I think the spring flower racemes have the florets packed more densely while the summer racemes seem to have the florets spaced further apart. I looked through pictures of ours over various years, trying to 'see' the difference: - We cut back some growth this morning that was extending beyond its allowed space, and harvested a couple of the summer flowers for a vase. (Nice fragrance to go with breakfast this morning!) You can see that the florets seem to be spaced well apart: This picture is from a couple of years ago, showing a summer bloom on the tree: And this is a picture of a cluster of spring flowers from a few years ago: When you look at the spring picture, it looks like the florets aren't all that much further apart than the summer ones in the picture of them on the tree. Perhaps the difference is that they open more quickly along the raceme in spring....? One of the things about wisteria that attract me is that they raise lots of questions to think about :-) There is not a great deal of reliable, detailed information on them that is readily available. I think their long-time-to-flowering-age makes them less attractive as a research subject! And I just noticed in the spring picture above that the florets seem to be growing in a spiral! Logical perhaps because of the vine's twining growth habit, but I had never noticed that effect on the flowers before just now! Anyone else out there fascinated with these plants....?