My colleague down south and I have completely different gardening style. He is a renowned landscape designer, so his home garden is as elaborate as the landscapes he designs for his clients. I am primarily a farmer of horticultural commodities, so my home garden is very strictly utilitarian, with few items that are grown just because they are pretty.
My colleague’s garden is outfitted with a very well built pergola over the patio at the rear of the home. Six common Chinese wisteria were installed to climb the six supporting post and sprawl above. Their cascading spring bloom is both spectacular and alluringly fragrant.
Of course, when I saw that pergola while the wisteria were still young, I thought that it would be ideal for Dago wisteria, which most of us know simply as grapes. They climb like Chinese wisteria. They bloom with somewhat pendulous floral trusses that . . . sort of resemble wisteria bloom. Although they lack color and fragrance, they provide an abundance of fruit.
Now I get to work with some real Dago wisteria. It was planted years ago by someone who did not stay to maintain it. It got rather overgrown and gnarly before I pruned it into submission. Without a pergola, I extended vines from the rail fence that the main vines climb, over to a banister on the upper floor of an adjacent building. It works something like a pergola.
Because I do not know what cultivar of grape the vine is, I do not know what pruning technique it prefers. I happened to leave long canes last winter, just because they reached the banister on the opposite side so well. Now, the bloom is so profuse that I am concerned about the weight of the subsequent fruit pulling the rail fence over!
Tony Tomeo 
Thanks for the laughs — they’re always welcome, but especially so over a first cuppa in the morning. Growing up as a Swede, there weren’t many ethnic slurs around, but there were plenty of Ole and Lena jokes, not to mention the well-known classic “Ten thousand Swedes ran into the weeds in the Battle of Copenhagen; ten thousand Swedes ran into the weeds, chased by one Norwegian!”
As for the grapes, our wild ones surely can run rampant, covering and shading out trees from time to time.
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What the heck? What is so bad about a Norwegian? . . . or is that more about the Swedes?
Ethnic slurs are not so common here anymore either. They are just too offensive. I know that Brent and I would be seriously offensive to anyone who might overhear one of our conversations.
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The little verse circulated among the Norwegians as a little tongue-in-cheek comment about the Swedes — who were, in fact, defeated at Copenhagen.
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Defeated . . . or merely chased off?
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Flat defeated. Then, chased off.
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How sad.
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Dago wisteria! I like that. Like Wisteria, the kind of grapes that grow around here tend to overwhelm everything around them. Though they don’t develop those massive trunks.
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Are they native muscadines or scuppernongs?
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Honestly not sure.
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I just realized that they are not native to your region.
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