DryStoneGarden

the wisteria shower

I swear this is the first time I’ve ever posted to the internet a photo of a man taking a shower.

This is our wisteria shower. Most of the year it’s a bamboo shower, but in April we get to shower with wisteria blooms cascading around us. It’s wonderful. On a spring evening, with the fragrance of the flowers and the dripping leaves and the steam rising, it’s a total immersion. We encourage guests to try it. They are initially a bit skeptical, but they become hooked as soon as they try it, and we’ve even had a friend ask to come over specifically for the experience.

Last year we got a better bloom, and two years ago a frosty winter had the wisteria absolutely covered in blooms. This year it’s enough to enjoy, but I want more. It’s an old, well-established wisteria with plenty of space to ramble so we’ve been slack about pruning it, but this year we’ll probably motivate. Wisteria is best pruned twice a year to create spurs and it’s generally a good idea to stay on top of your vine, show it who’s boss. The Monster, in Sierra Madre, CA, is the most extreme example of what happens if you let your vine run wild. That wisteria, a single Chinese vine planted to cover a house, eventually swallowed up the house and caused it to be demolished, took over an entire acre of land, has an estimated weight of 250 tons, blossom count of 1.5 million per year, branches over 500 feet long, and is listed as one of the seven horticultural wonders of the world. The town now has an annual festival celebrating it.

Our wisteria isn’t quite at that level, but it’s one of the great features of our garden. We have two vines in our yards, a younger Chinese vine, Wisteria sinensis, and the Japanese one over the shower, Wisteria floribunda. Chinese wisteria is the more commonly planted variety around here, but the Japanese one is more fragrant and has longer flower clusters, so we’re glad it’s the one over the shower. Our landlord is the one who planted the wisteria, and he did it before he even added the porch, let alone the shower, but it turned out really well. I think one of his motivations for the shower, beyond mere aesthetics, was that the bathroom is old and somewhat poorly ventilated and it would generally be a good idea for the house if we showered outside, but, whatever the reason, he added a great feature to the house, one we’ll probably try to recreate in any other house we might ever move to.

Tags: outdoor shower, wisteria

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 19th, 2009 at 10:31 am and is filed under miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.