Today I'm at Fenton House in North London which has a lovely garden designed by the National Trust
as a setting for this historic house. The walls here are smothered in climbers and today
the gardener in charge Andy Darragh is going to show us how he prunes his wisteria.
Oh hi Beccy.
Hiya, you've got loads of lovely tall walls here which is great opportunity for climbers.
I'm really lucky with the tall walls, really, really lucky.
And would you say this wisteria is one of the stars of the show?
Definitely one of the stars of the show I absolutely love it. It looks great when it's in full lilac colour dropping its lovely flowers
and then the white bench just becomes so luminous and white.
And then at the same time the rose behind you, has creamy yellow flowers
so there's creamy yellow against the mauve-purpley colour, oh it's just heaven.
Is this a wisteria sinensis or a wisteria floribunda?
This is a wisteria sinensis.
So that's the one that has the slightly shorter flowers but they come before the leaves?
Yes.
So you prune them twice a year, is that right?
That's right. In the middle of the summer and then the middle of the winter.
I always think it's a really great plant to have because you get two options to prune.
They're great to have in a place where you want to restrict it a little bit more, or do something quite funky with it and grow up things
so I think it's a great thing to do and also it's quite nice to do a bit of summer pruning because most of the pruning's done in the winter.
OK so could you show us what you do in summer and what you do this time of year?
So it's early August and I'm going to be doing the wisteria summer prune and basically when you see shoots like this...
It's often July or August time, with long extension growth like this wispy growth,
this is the time to prune it. And why? Because if you're growing a wisteria on a building it would be attaching itself to gutters and going into windows
but it also tidies it up quite well and lets the light in.
It also helps with flowering spurs for the following season
so it takes it away from extension growth and focuses its energy onto flower bud growth.
and so what we do is we prune back to one, two, three, four, five buds
and then that is a bud there that you can cut on.
So you carry on pruning until you think you've got most of this wispy growth off
and then that's it until the middle of winter and then you do the winter prune.
I'm looking at this wisteria here can you see where it was cut after what is now five buds,
but back then in mid summer it was cut to one, two three, four, five leaves - there would have been leaves coming off from here
and now we're pruning it to one or two buds in midwinter.
OK so you've shortened that right down to a short spur now and is that where the flower buds will come in future years?
Yeah hopefully so, and hopefully they will fatten up now and
instead of creating lots of little racines or flower droplets, it will create a longer flower droplet and last a little bit longer.
So the summer prune is about pretty much tidying up the climber to let the light in,
and now we've got the five buds it's more about the quality rather than the quantity.
So I can see a couple that are really long, did they not get cut back in summer? What do you do with them now?
It's okay that you've missed some, it really is,
and you can literally just cut them back now to the two or three buds.
So this one I'm definitely going to get rid of, so I'm just going to cut it off to two
and then all of this that it's gone round, I'm just going to take it all out.
They're really prone to getting tangled around themselves.
They really are. You can tap it to see what's dead because some of it actually dies off, and that tidies it up as well.
How long does it take you to do a climber as big as this?
Well if it's just simple maintenance, it can take about half a day to a day. It's a nice job to do.
So I've just found this one here and I was looking at this hole in the space of the archway.
I was hoping to use it and tie up into that hole
and it will help create a new part of the structure of the wisteria
because this of course is decades of people pruning it and it's been a labor of love to create it.
I really love pruning all climbers but I have to say I do find that pruning wisteria is one of the simplest.
As long as you keep to the main rule of when to prune, in mid-summer July-August and midwinter in January-February
then I find that you can't really go wrong with pruning.
Well that's really encouraging for people to know and I hope if they follow those principles everyone will have as much success as you do
and I hope I can come back and see these wisterias in full flower.
National Trust gardens can be a great source of inspiration
and our gardeners and volunteers are always happy to talk
so why not come along and visit one of our places or get The National Trust School of Gardening from our shop.