PlantFiles: American Wisteria
Wisteria frutescens 'Amethyst Falls'

Mine blooms early in Spring with masses of flowers. I have two on an arbor and they are going so strong I'm worried about the arbor. I think the secret is to do NOTHING for them--I planted in clay soil, I don't give them any fertilizer, and they get too much water in Spring (rained 7" just last week) and have survived two bad late summer droughts. I just relented and gave the nearby clematis some compost, hope that's not a problem. The Wisteria flowers have a light scent, unnoticeable unless you stick your nose in them and then light and nice.

I love this wisteria! The first winter bunnies ate it down to 6 inches. First summer, it grew to 6 feet on a fence where it overwintered taking cold winds -- not protected at all. I changed up my bed to blueberries and I had to move the wisteria. I decided to try to turn it into a tree. There was one main stalk that I kept and cut off everything else. I also cut of every leaf/branch 5 feet high and left leaf buds on only 5 to 6 inches on the main branch. I assumed no flowers this year. I was wrong! There are 6 buds on that 5 inches of main stem. They are opening now. I will post a pic when they are in full bloom. It looks so funny now, like a tiny lollypop. My area is a very cold zone 5a -- I think it gets below that. We had a very hard winter and almost every spring shrub did not bloom, but this wiseria made it with flying colors! This is a super plus for us cold zone 5a areas.

I bought a nice size Amethyst Falls last year and planted it in my front yard, opting for the American variety over the rampant, prolific Asian wisteria. It was blooming when I bought it, and continued to bloom throughout spring and there was even a small second flush of blooms in summer. It flowers are much less beautiful than the Chinese variety of wisteria, and to my dismay they do, indeed, smell like a male cat marked its territory on the shrub.

Nonetheless, I trained it almost into a weeping shape which looks quite lovely and pruned throughout summer to keep it tamed. Unfortunately, I didn't take into consideration that it would lose its leaves come fall and leave a bare skeleton of a plant (and the thick stakes for support) in my front yard. It looked pretty bad all winter, an eyesore, and then in spring it started coming back again.

Unfortunately, a late freeze killed a lot of the growth back, but it produced a few blooms for me and left nice foliage into the summer. Right now it's about 6 feet high.

Since it has lost all of its leaves again for the year, its bare branches out front have begun looking pretty sorry, and I decided to dig it out and try growing it in a huge pot. Digging it out was a challenge-- its roots have gone deep into the ground, and I don't think I got them all. I bought a 24 gallon pot and have the plant in its new potted home out in the back of my house. It already looks quite handsome in its pot. I wonder if I will get any success-- has anyone else tried growing American wisteria in a pot?

I just bought an amethyst falls and it says zone 5a one it or
-20 to -10 degrees fahrenheit. My friend succesfully got it to come back in tact (no dead branches) and says it has atleast 8 blooms on it right now. I bought one because it was the only wisteria i have found blooming in the store. They also said there have been cases of a 1 year old seedling flowering. So that shows you how young this wisteria can be.

I checking this wisteria off as 'negative' for one reason. It STINKS, literally! It is quite pretty but compared to my other wisteria, the fragrance is horrible! I have this wisteria planted at the end of my deck on one side of the steps. I have another wisteria planted on the other side of the steps. The latter one was planted at a different time and finally bloomed this year after 4 yrs! It smelled WONDERFUL!

When my second one bloomed for the first time last year, I thought cats had been relieving themselves around my deck. I was like EWWWW! So I was quite surprised when I stuck my face in the flower and realized that was what stunk. When it bloomed this year (a month after the first one), once again the stench was back. I'm thinking I may dig this one up and try and find one of the nice smelling ones (of course, I don't know the name of my other one!) to replace it.

This plant, like many others that grow well in the South (-East OR -West), is slow to break dormancy in the spring. While the Clematis I planted to twine in my Wisteria is happily scrambling and rambling, the Wisteria is just barely beginning to leaf out. The take-home lesson: Don't give up on this plant until later in the season than you think is reasonable.

Wisteria frutescens grows about 1/2 the rate of asian species and flowers from new growth. This make it a great plant for areas that are prone to late frosts. Wisteria frutescens flowers have a musky smell compared to the sweet fragrance of their asian counterparts. Propagates best from dormant wood cuttings with 2000ppm IBA