Hi all,
I have this Wisteria, supermarket buy. Always been intruiged by them, but impulse purchase - saw and bought. So didn't research prior. The flowers got me!
Planned on having as a climber along the fence, however after research found it'll be too heavy when it matures, and poisenous to dogs.
Soooo thinking perhaps bonsai instead. Reckon it's worth it? I know they can be rather tricky. Seems a shame to not put it to good use, they flowers really are lovely.
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I've had a number of them as bonsai over the years. I collect old thick-trunked Chinese Wisteria (wisteria sinensis) from the woods around me. They are an invasive naturalized plant here and they're everywhere. They are easy to collect, even BIG trunks as they are extremely vigorous growers. I always get a laugh when I see someone actually buying one...but their ready availability is only one reason for that laugh. The other is that the person forking over the money rarely understands what they're getting into
FWIW, I no longer have any wisteria bonsai. They tend to be a pain in the butt as unruly houseguests go. They are extremely aggressive growers and only look good as bonsai for a month of the year while they're in bloom. The remainder of the year, particularly in late spring and summer, they are unruly haystacks of grabbing tendrils and overgrowing overshadowing leaves that have to be constantly pruned back--sometimes with a whip and a chair. They only thicken slowly in containers. In the ground, they expand like a filling fire hose. They take over gardens here quickly if planted in the ground. I've had eight foot extension growth on some shoots in a couple of days on some of the containerized wildlings I've collected over the years. If planted near a house (in the ground or in a container), the plant can pull off aluminum or vinyl siding in a week. In a couple of years of such growth, it can pull a structure down and crack foundations.
The plant you have chosen is too small really for bonsai use at this point--five years of ground growing would solve that issue and produce a decent trunk. Practically, flower racemes on Chinese wisteria tend to be a foot long and heavy. On some Japanese varieties flower racemes can be three feet long. All that growth and flowering require a decently sturdy trunk to support it all, lest the bonsai be pulled over, or subject to the wind.
You can have fun seeing what having a wisteria is like, of course. It can be entertaining for a year or two when it flowers. If you keep it in your garden, make sure the pot is NOT sitting directly on the ground. If it is, the plant could "escape" with new growth through the bottom of the container. That new growth can grow along the ground and not be visible until it pops up 25 feet away on one of your trees. It's sneaky and once freed, will colonize entire areas.
I sometimes miss having one and there are some interesting trunks left in the woods to collect.
The first photo is of a wisteria trunk near an old abandon plantation near me. The trunk at ground level is about eight inches in diameter. The twists and turns in its trunk all take place within a six foot area. The rest of the plant is 50 feet up a nearby oak tree. The second is of an abandoned house in North Carolina. where a wisteria was was left to its own devices ALL of the green in that photos, from the gutters to the front lawn is wisteria...I think the wisteria won...
