how much sunlight does a wisteria need?

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Loligo Murphysboro, IL(Zone 6b) Jun 23, 2008

Hello! Last summer we bought a house where some avid gardeners once lived, so there are lots of nice plants and features that they left behind. One is a pergola covered by a vine that I believe is a wisteria (based on the leaves, the shape of the buds and shoots, etc.) -- however, we've lived here for 13 months now, and the vine has yet to flower.

It only gets about an hour of direct sun each day; the rest is shade or filtered light. (The trees all around it are honey locusts, so their thin, sparse leaves let through more light than most other trees would, but still....) I would hate to rip out a large, old plant like this, but if it's never going to flower, I'd rather replace it with something more useful.

Any other ideas about what the problem might be? I've been spraying it once a month or so with an organic foliar feed -- now I've got more leaves than ever, but still no flowers. Also, I don't know if it's a cultivated wisteria or a wild native that the original gardeners just left in place; we do have the native plant rambling through our woods, but that hasn't flowered yet either, that I've seen.

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ecrane3 Dublin, CA(Zone 9a) Jun 23, 2008

They typically need full sun in order to bloom. If you want to be sure though, I'd wait until next year and make sure you don't prune it between now and then (if it's the more common Asian wisteria they bloom on old wood, so another frequent cause of them not blooming is being pruned at the wrong time of year). I also wouldn't fertilizer it, they tend to do best without a lot of TLC (including fertilizer and water). I also suspect the ones you see in the woods are probably the invasive Asian wisterias, they have a tendency to escape cultivation and are probably more common than the native American one, although I hope yours are the nice native ones!

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Loligo Murphysboro, IL(Zone 6b) Jun 23, 2008

Thanks for the info! I can definitely say that it hasn't been pruned in at least six years -- the woman who owned the house for five years before us said that she didn't do anything to the yard or garden but mow it. No weeding, no watering, no pruning, no nothing. And I've only been fertilizing the plant since this spring -- I didn't touch it last year. So, yeah, it definitely sounds like the light situation is the problem.

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