I've always loved wisteria; as a kid, when my parents bought our first house, it was covered in the front with it. The smell was heavenly, the bees were not. Nonetheless, I loved it from the get go and the color purple added to its charm.
Forward in time to when my then-husband decided to plant wisteria in our front yard. We had gotten a huge arch made out of metal tubing and I had no idea he had planted it until he told me. Said he planted pink on one side and purple on the other. "Great" I said thinking it would look something like this picture--it is a real one of my friend's wisteria in Alabama.
And so I waited and waited. Oh the vines started climbing all right--they eventually got about twenty feet tall and curled this way and that as if they were alive. Did it ever bloom? It had one bloom on it and that looked absurd. One day when I came home from teaching school, I saw about twenty or more blooms. What had happened? Well, I'll tell you what happened: He had gone out and bought fake wisteria blooms and had hung them on the vines. Who in their right mind would do that? I mean it looked nice but they were fake. Neighbors came over to see those glorious new blooms and upon feeling them knew they were not real. So much to his disdain, he took them down and it was much to my relief.
After we got divorced, that wisteria grew even more tall and seemed to take on a life of its own. It grew and grew and curled to the roof and curled to the fence to the right. Frightening if you were to ask me and it did remind me of that movie "Little Shop of Horrors" where the plants came alive. The wisteria came to be scary. I'd hire people to trim it way down and almost the next day, it had grown taller. Developed a hatred of it because it never bloomed and that fear factor didn't help one bit. None. Nada.
Three years ago I got a new arch and prior to that, I had to hire three men who said that they knew what they were doing. It was like watching The Three Stooges at work. Why they got the old arch out all right--they threw it across the street and over the hill. Then they got the new arch up and cemented it into the ground. Sort of looked like what eight year olds would do but at least it didn't fall over. They also cut down that wisteria and I felt not only happiness but gratefulness in that it was GONE. Wrong. Within a week, that vine started to grow again.
Called a woman who does yard work and she used weed killer on it and it was gone--or so I thought.
Now when she does my yard, she has to rid the wisteria...it's coming back up again in all sorts of places. Whatever kind my ex planted, it sure wasn't any normal variety. Come to think of it, neither was he. Maybe there was a connection there. Had to be. And so you can see why I am not fond of wisteria anymore or at least whatever form is out in my yard. I just now rhyme WISTERIA with HYSTERIA. Works for me.
Sherry Hill
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