If you want your garden to look like something out of a fairytale, then adding some wisteria is a good place to start. This dreamy trailing plant is so striking, and looks fabulous when hanging down from structures in your garden or house.
It’s thankfully pretty easy to look after too, but like all plants, it does need a bit of care. Gardening expert Michael, also known as the Mediterranean Gardener on TikTok, says there’s an easy way to get your wisteria to flower in late summer, and it’s a task you should do now. Wisteria should already have bloomed a few weeks ago, but it’s possible to give it a second ‘flourish’ in a few months’ time.
Giving your wisteria a prune right now will give it the best chance of continuing to thrive well into the late summer – and it’s so easy to do.
Demonstrating to his own plant, Michael explained that wisteria – while it did bloom a few weeks ago – will probably now just look like a ‘mass of leaves’ with seed pods ‘popping up everywhere’.
He said: “Left to their own devices, these whips are going to give you a load of leaves but no flowers”.
Explaining how to prune the out-of-control plant, Michael said: “We want to cut this long whippy growth back to around four or five buds from the base of this season’s growth.”
Holding up a discarded piece of the plant, he continued: “The second thing we’re going to do is get rid of all these seed pods. There’s two reasons for that.
“Number one, it’s just not worth growing wisteria from seed. And number two, we don’t want the plant putting its energy into growing seeds.”
When you’re pruning the seed pods, make sure you cut right back to the base – you don’t need to leave any buds here.
Showing off his handiwork, which resulted in a much tidier and cleaner looking plant, Michael continued: “[This] lets light and air into the plant and is now directing its energy into something useful.”