Posted on April 22, 2016
I have a wisteria vine in my back yard. I didn’t buy it from a store, I snitched a root of the stuff from a vine growing by the side of the road, like a weed. Wisteria requires constant attention, it sends out runners and it will climb over anything in its way. It only blooms for a week every year. And I suppose the maintenance to pleasure ratio of keeping a wisteria vine is probably high. Meaning more maintenance than pleasure.
But I wouldn’t give up my wisteria. In fact, no plant in my garden gives me more happiness. When it blooms, as it is right now, it perfumes the air with the scent of tutti-fruitti bubblegum. The bumblebees come to it for its nectar and the sound of their droning wings is surprisingly pleasant. In fact dining under the wisteria when it’s in bloom is about as good as it gets in my back yard garden.
So I mark the years by the blooming wisteria. But even when it’s not in bloom, the vine makes me happy. Many years ago, the Georgia Good Ole boy built me a deck and a pergola for the climbing vine. Now, in the deep summer the wisteria gives me a living canopy of shade. And when the winter comes the snow on the twisted vine is starkly beautiful.
I have to prune the wisteria almost on a weekly basis in the summer. It sprouts up everywhere, puts out runners, and grows up over the eaves and the roof. Every few years I have to thin it, or its weight would pull down the pergola. As it is the pergola is starting to sag under its weight, but somehow the slightly off-square structure makes my back yard deck feel like some ancient Italian spot, with a vine as old as time.
My kids think I’m slightly nutty because of the emotions and the memories this one plant raises in me. So many wonderful meals under its blooming branches or deep shade. So many years of pictures of the kids in front of it. So many winters with the snow lying on its gnarled limbs. The photos above were all taken this year. The video below is of Richard Shindell, a singer songwriter, performing his song, Wisteria — in which he uses the vine as a metaphor for a happy life that he lived in a house with a vine that climbed along the eaves.
