Pruning Wisterias

During a visit home to the east coast many years ago, I was out in the backyard with my father, admiring the lawn and the flowers that are once again under his careful direction and care, since his retirement and decision to cut back all unnecessary and frivolous expenses, including the weekly landscaper. 

One of my mother’s prized possessions of the vegetation kind is the wisteria tree they started from a graft of a wisteria vine that grows near their summer cottage at the Cape.  If you are unfamiliar with the wisteria, it is beautiful, fragrant and vine-y, it grows and climbs and can get pretty unruly if one doesn’t tame it, train it and force it to grow around a porch post, lattice, fence or pergola.  It also seems to have a short window of blossom time in the early spring.   Typically the wisteria flowers are lavender in color, but I have also seen a white one in Northern California. 

In my parents’ yard, the wisteria grew more like a bush, with branches shooting out in every direction, not unlike what one’s hair might look like after sticking one’s finger into a live electrical socket.  No attempt was made by my parents to train the wisteria around a post of any kind.  To my mother’s chagrin, the wisteria never looked as beautiful or full as the one it spawned from. 

One day, the day I mentioned above when I was visiting, while the wisteria was minding its own business, not bothering a soul, my father had some divine inspiration.  He went into the garage and came out with some rather large pruning clippers.  They looked like a gigantic, mutant, dangerous set of scissors.  He handed them to me (they were ridiculously heavy and cumbersome), and asked me to trim back the branches so that the wisteria wouldn’t look so out of control.  I have no idea why my father would choose me to be in charge of such an important task.  I didn’t have a green thumb.  I wasn’t an arborist by any stretch of the imagination.  I knew nothing about landscaping or gardening.  I had never rented or owned a home where I had to do my own yard maintenance.  I always had more pressing weekend priorities, such as playing softball or tennis, or distractions of the male persuasion.  I always had a property manager that took care of my yards and I liked it that way.  But it wasn’t for me to question.  When my father gets something on his mind, he can’t relax until he tackles it, and so I took the clippers and I randomly began to clip.  My father periodically checked in on my progress.  He was satisfied with my work.  My mother peeked through the window from inside the house, but made no comment. 

Some months later, I received a phone call from my parents that since I had cut back the wisteria, it had sprung back to flowering life with a renewed vigor.  I had begun to wonder if I had somehow missed my calling; if I didn’t have some untapped arborist potential, if I had missed my true calling, if I had an inner Lorax. 

The following year, my father became inspired again.  Unbeknownst to my mother, he cut the wisteria down to its roots!  It was barely a stump.  When he showed it to me, I was a bit perplexed.  I had no idea why he felt the need to essentially cut it to the ground and I knew my mother would not be happy. 

Digression time.  My parents have an interesting relationship.  Married 51 years, they have somehow managed not to kill each other, despite their opposite personalities and temperaments.  My father is a bit impulsive, impatient, and explosive at times.  My mother is cautious, patient and introspective.  They are an inspiration to anyone who knows them, of two people who have managed to live together and love each other for so many years, accepting each other’s differences, for better or for worse. 

When my mother looked out the window, and saw what was left of the wisteria, she was literally speechless (other than the marathon of curse words that I got to hear).  You could see smoke coming out of her ears.  Note to the male species:  when a woman is utterly speechless and doesn’t say a word in your presence, she is PISSED.  Silence does speak louder than words.  When I am quiet with someone of the male species, which is a rare phenomenon, that someone is definitely in the shithouse where I'm concerned.  Oddly, in rare occasions, I display my father’s red hot fire and off the Fahrenheit scale reaction.   I call it Italian temperament and I inherited it from both Italian sides of my family.  I am truly a physical example of the laws of genetic inheritance.

It was at least two days before my mother spoke to my father with anything other than an utterance after the wisteria incident.  I am not entirely convinced my father even noticed that she was mad at him and what he had done.   It is funny sometimes to be a spectator of the relationship between a man and a woman.  Our brains are wired so differently, our chemical makeup, personalities and behavior are so completely opposite, it is really quite a miracle that men and women are able to co-exist at all.  Even something as innocent as pruning a wisteria can be a lethal endeavor.