340 The Chinese Wistaria. 



THE CHINESE WISTARIA. 



By W. H. Noble, Bridgeport, Conn. 



I HAVE not seen in your Journal deserved notice of the versatile 

 capacities and eminent merits of the beautiful Chinese Wistaria. There 

 are several varieties, among them a white. There is also an American 

 species, less vigorous, and less profuse in bloom, than its foreign 

 relation. 



As a graceful climber, of wonderful luxuriance, all lovers of floral 

 elegance render tribute to its unrivalled charms of foliage and bloom. 

 It is also very hardy and wonderfully vigorous. When once estab- 

 lished, it readily drapes a hundred feet of wall or veranda with its 

 green and azure mantle. This luxuriant loveliness it brought from its 

 wild-wood homes in the flowery land, and, were it capable of only this 

 lavishness of vegetation and charm, would be a peerless plant. 

 • But it adopts educated habitudes quite as unique and exquisite. 

 You can dwarf and subdue its native vigor into the modest stoutness 

 and stature of a low shrub or bush, or the more ambitious stateliness 

 of a small tree, or you may train it into the graceful droop of a weeper. 

 To these forms, once adopted, it patiently adheres, exacting little care, 

 and forgetting the rampant habit of its nature. 



Much of that native vigor, which shoots up into wood and leaf in 

 these adopted forms and habits, expends its force in the bloom which 

 veils the plant in a cloud of azure. In the variety of a weeping tree 

 it has no rival among that graceful form of plants ; nor is the work of 

 cultui'e to induce these acquired shapes either tedious or difiicult. You 

 must, indeed, pinch or prune down its luxuriance, and for a few years 

 stay its trunk by some support. But in that time it will acquire a 

 robustness and stout stature, able to lift, six, eight, or ten feet from the 

 ground, its graceful drapery of leaf and flower. No ornament on the 

 lawn can be more charming than one of these subdued aspects of the 

 plant. I have seen each of them arresting the delighted admiration of 

 crowds. Why will not some of oin- nurserymen make a specialty of 

 these educated forms of the Chinese Wistaria.? 



