Wisteria - that wonderful long, flowing vine with the perfumed purple flowers that wilt almost as soon as they're picked - has been a part of my family culture far longer than I can remember. And so it was with great respect for family tradition, as well as a desire for privacy and beauty that wouldn't take forever to grow, that I decided to buy the house I bought five years ago. My reason was to plant and enjoy my own wisteria.
Great clusters of pale purple wisteria framed the doorway of my grandparents' house in Boston. They were my first introduction to this prodigious vine. And my parents' house, into which we moved when I was two, soon boasted a breathtaking cascade of leaves and flowers going up to and around the front balcony.
A family story has it that my father invited a lady he thought he was going to marry to come up from New York to spend the weekend (carefully chaperoned, of course) with his parents. Bursting with love and the pride of his handiwork, he rose early in the morning to cut a few wisteria blossoms for his inamorata's breakfast tray. The lady, unfortunately for her, hadn't been clued in. "What's this stuff?" she complained. "I'm used to roses with my breakfast." Needless to say, she didn't pass the test and was packed off whence she had come.
My own first house was, unluckily, in the middle of Vermont, and I tried hard to maintain the tradition there. But the winters were just too cold, and two years' worth of trying produced only a few measly tendrils that refused to climb, much less flower.
So, as I told my wife, I remained unfulfilled. I couldn't achieve my ancestral mission until I had successfully planted wisteria of my own. Our next move brought us to the Washington, D.C., area, and as we chose to live downtown, it took a bit of seeking to find a location that would allow enough room and sun. But find it we did, and a three-foot wisteria went into the ground the first spring.
Noble Pedigree
As is true of so many of our lovely growing things, wisteria is native to the Orient, where it has been cultivated for uncounted centuries. A member of the pea family, its most widely grown species is wisteria sinensis. Although, as its name indicates, sinensis is Chinese in origin, it did not remain an oriental secret.
Wisteria must have been growing in England in Shakespeare's day, as he referred to it in Hamlet as "the long purples" among which Ophelia went wandering and was eventually entwined. It's easy to see why she lost her way - a full-grown, untrained wisteria vine can easily seem like a forest.
Cultivated and shown properly, wisteria is possibly the most civilized, elegant growing thing imaginable. Countless English castles and their imitations in this county, not to mention many of our more imposing public buildings, boast graceful, ancient vines, many of them hundreds of years old.
One of the most familiar examples of wisteria in art is Louis Comfort Tiffany's View of Oyster Bay, a stained-glass rendering of an estate on Long Island, New York, the original of which is in the Metropolitan
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