Wisteria

Wisteria (also spelled Wistaria) is a genus of flowering plants in the pea family, Fabaceae. It contains about ten species of woody climbing vines native to the eastern United States and the East Asian states of China, Korea, and Japan. Aquarists refer to the species Hygrophila difformis, in the family Acanthaceae, as Water Wisteria.

Wisteria vines climb by twining their stems either clockwise or counter-clockwise round any available support. They can climb as high as 20 m above ground and spread out 10 m laterally. The world's largest known Wisteria vine is located in Sierra Madre, California, measuring more than 1 acre (0.40 ha) in size and weighing 250 tons.

The leaves are alternate, 15 to 35 cm long, pinnate, with 9 to 19 leaflets. The flowers are produced in pendulous racemes 10 to 80 cm long, similar to those of the genus Laburnum, but are purple, violet, pink or white, not yellow. Flowering is in the spring (just before or as the leaves open) in some Asian species, and in mid to late summer in the American species and W. japonica. The flowers of some species are fragrant, most notably Chinese Wisteria. The seeds are produced in pods similar to those of Laburnum, and, like that genus, are poisonous.

There are two noted attributions for the name Wisteria. One, that the botanist Thomas Nuttall named the genus Wisteria in honour of Dr. Caspar Wistar (1761 - 1818) — some call it Wistaria but the misspelling is conserved under the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature.The other, that the genus was named after Charles Jones Wister, Sr., of Grumblethorpe, the grandson of merchant and wine importer John Wister.Daniel Wister, Charles's father, joined with Samuel Miles and Robert Morris to underwrite the voyage of the American commercial vessel Empress of China. On board the ship was the vine that would later bear the Wister name.

Wisteria species are used as food plants by the larvae of some Lepidoptera species including brown-tail. It is also an extremely popular ornament in China and Japan.


Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisteria

See Also: Flowers, Florist, Florists