DryStoneGarden

Showering in the Rain

One of the things we’ve discovered with our outdoor shower is that it is surprisingly pleasant to take a shower in the rain. At night in the rain is usually the best — the rising steam and dripping plants create a wonderful tropical ambience — but daytime is better now while the wisteria is blooming. It feels quite decadent to shampoo your hair with a bunch of wisteria flowers hanging five inches from your face.

Wisteria Shower Curtain

Our wisteria is the Japanese one, Wisteria floribunda, which has longer, more fragrant bloom clusters that open more gradually over a longer period than the more common Chinese wisteria, Wisteria sinensis. It doesn’t give us the dramatic every-flower-open-at-once photos of the Chinese, but it gives us a longer season of showers, which is more valuable to us. Today’s rainy showers are at the start of its peak. Pretty soon the flowers will be getting stuck to us while we shower.

Pandorea Flowers

One of the other vines in our garden is a Pandorea pandorana. It’s overhead on a trellis, screening us from our neighbor’s second story windows, and we probably don’t appreciate it as much as we should. I knew it was blooming but didn’t pay much attention until this recent storm when it dropped hundreds of flowers on the little side patio that it shades. Not as nice as some fallen flowers can be, but still one heck of a lot of flowers.

the wisteria shower

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

This is our wisteria shower. Most of the year it’s a bamboo shower, but in April you get to shower with the wisteria blooms cascading around you. The shower is on our front porch, but so far no one has walked in on either of us and the bamboos in pots around the shower do a good job of screening. Guests are usually a bit skeptical at first, but they become hooked as soon as they try it. We have an indoor shower, too, but it’s much nicer to shower outside, especially when the wisteria is in bloom.

Last year we got a much better bloom and two winters ago we had a frosty winter that had the wisteria covered in blooms. 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. You prune wisteria 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 and 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.

EwaintheGarden has a great gallery of wisteria photos.

ryan 4/19