The End of An Era: Wisteria Removal

This has been a year of simplifying in our yard. And let me be clear -- simplifying is hard work. Sounds like an oxymoron of some sort, but it's true. We're on our second dumpster for the year, which would make it sound like we have a lot of junk in our yard. And that's not really the case. We're just working on making things a little less maintenance-heavy in our yard. We have a dumpster in our front yard for a week, and we're doing our best to do all of the dumpster-worthy projects while it's here.

On Monday we took down our backyard wisteria. It's that awesome vine growing all along our deck railing. It's been growing for 14 years!

Don't get me wrong. I love wisteria, and I loved that vine. The thing I didn't love was that as the years went on, it took more and more work.

It would get very, very unwieldy with it's branches growing out, and to keep it tidy up on the deck, I had to trim it up every week during the growing season of summer. And if I didn't, it's tentacles would almost reach out and grab people as they walked by. I'm not kidding about that.

I loved the sweet view it gave from the bottom patio. Everything was framed in leaves. To think... that whole railing around the top deck was covered with leaves and branches from the single trunk below.

The real clincher was that every other day, our patio needed sweeping because of all of the leaves it tends to drop. And who has time for that? Especially with 7 grand babies to snuggle and play with. Nope. I don't want to have extra chores that take my precious time.

So... Monday night, when Bob came home from work, we started on one end, and went to town.

I loved being able to see the backyard as we got going. I had missed being able to see that when I was in the kitchen, or anywhere on the main floor, for that matter. In the picture below, we had cut up to the point you see, and if you look carefully, you can see the tentacles of the wisteria that were reaching out and needing to be cut back.

Now, a wisteria that has grown for that many years is liable to get itself wrapped around things pretty tightly.

It took some doing to remove the old big vines from their grasp.

But after about two hours time, we had it all down! If you look closely at the photo below, you can still see the stump in front of the middle brick post. We'll get that taken care of this weekend.

Well, we almost have it all down. There is one "hanger-on-er" that is going to take some work. This guy actually bent the rod iron that it was attached to. I'm tempted to leave it there as a conversation piece.

I'm totally happy with the results. I love being able to see everything in the backyard now, from the house. I am going to love a little less maintenance in our yard. 

Funny thing is, our front yard wisteria has these beautiful blooms right now, which is totally off-season. This generally happens in the early spring. It's almost as if it's saying, "Look how pretty I am. You would never want to cut me down, right?". And it would be right. So far, the front yard wisteria is much more manageable and we keep it contained to a smaller area. I don't really have to do much with it more than once or twice a year. Easy enough. For now.