American Wisteria and Growing Fruit Trees

I think wisteria is one of the more problematic plants in our gardens. Even if your neighbor has one in full bloom, yours may have no blooms at all. Who can say that about forsythia?
If your wisteria plant was started from seed, the vine may never bloom, according to an article in the New York Times. If your seed grown plants do bloom, it may take them as long as five years.
Then there’s the problem of spring freezes. A good mid- to late season freeze will kill the buds on the wisteria. Result: no flowers this year. Is there something you can do about that?
The Times says yes. If you’ve bought your wisteria in the last ten years or so, there’s a good chance it’s a Chinese or Japanese wisteria, which blooms early in the year. Native American wisteria, Wisteria frutescens, blooms later in the season and often reblooms, so chances for flowering are greater. The American wisteria is also a less aggressive plant. If you’ve ever wrestled with the runners from the Asian vines, you’ll appreciate this quality. The Times gives two sources for American wisteria: Bloom River Gardens (541) 726-8997 or www.bloomriver.com, and (828) 738-8300 or www.we-du.com.
Correct pruning will also help flowering, whether Asian or American wisteria. Often a vine will make too much foliage at the expense of flowers. Here’s what you should do: “Once the danger of hard frost is past, count three or four leaf buds out from the older branches and cut the younger ones there. Be ruthless: you will be cutting off far more than you will be keeping.
“Most flower buds grow on thick little branches near the trunk and main stems. They are round compared with the leaf buds, which are longer, almost pointy. When in doubt, wait a month or so, until the flower buds look like tiny grape clusters.”
Flowers are equally important on fruit trees and if you’re planting any this spring, here are a few things to remember. All apple and pear trees will bear more fruit if they are cross-pollinated. This means that you need two different varieties of apples or two different varieties of pears, so bees can bring the pollen from one variety of apple or pear to another. Apple pollen won’t do your pear tree any good, so planting one apple and one pear tree is not helpful.
The two varieties of apple must be planted reasonably close together. As Lewis Hill writes in the excellent book “Fruits and Berries for the Home Garden”: “Although bees can and do travel much farther, as a rule the busy little fellows should not be forced to fly more than several hundred feet to bring about the mating of these blossoms.”
The apple varieties must also bloom at about the same time. Just like daylilies, daffodils and peonies, there are early, mid-season and late blooming varieties. Fortunately, the majority of apple varieties are mid-season bloomers. The Trees of Antiquity catalog, (805) 467-2509 or
www.treesofantiquity.com, has a detailed bloom time list for apple and pear varieties.
What if you only have room for one fruit tree? Hill has a suggestion on how to “pull a fast one on nature”:
“If only one pear tree is in bloom, we drive across town to an abandoned farm where a big ancient pear tree is blossoming away, borrow a few flowers, and bring them home. We put them in a bucket of water under the tree and the bees take over from there.”
And the sooner the bees get to the flowers, the better. Hill says that fruit tree flowers that are pollinated soon after they bloom seem to be more resistant to a light frost than the “virgin blooms. The pistil, which carries the pollen down the flower, is delicate and easily damaged. Apparently if pollination has already taken place and the pistil is no longer needed, the bloom can stand a lower temperature than if it were unpollinated.”
It’s only the pollinated blossoms that bear fruit. So when you hear the bees buzzing in your fruit tree, don’t panic. Instead, be grateful.