It must be the greatest story of the Chiswick district of west London: that the old Fuller’s Griffin Brewery may have the oldest wisteria in the country. And that the young plant that was planted there in 1816 may well be one of the first two European specimens of the Wisteria sinensis, the Chinese wisteria, the species that appears most often in gardens here. The other plant would have been taken to the famous Kew botanical garden, about two miles away, but it would not have survived.
It is an evergreen in London travel guides and during the tours that the brewery organizes. Sometimes the ‘maybe’ even disappears altogether, as in the thought-provoking video that popular British botanist James Wong posted to Instagram this week for his 527,000 followers: “This is the oldest wisteria in Europe,” says Wong, posing at Fuller’s. “It is from this one plant that almost every wisteria you see in Europe today was cloned.”
Mozart among the plants
“That is not entirely true,” says wisteria expert Marc Libert cautiously. He is a collection holder in the Ghent university botanical garden and has been an enthusiastic collector of wisterias for thirty years. “The Mozart among plants,” he calls the wisteria. “Everyone knows the wisteria, and it is unique in terms of color, scent and inflorescence. The amount of flowers is phenomenal, sometimes almost too much.”
What is true is that wisterias can grow very old: “In Japan there is a Wisteria floribunda that is said to be 600 years old.” And it is also true that a wisteria can be cloned endlessly. This is done by grafting a young shoot onto a rootstock. “You get an endless series of clones, but that doesn’t hurt: those cuttings are as fresh and young as you want.”
The first European wisteria may have produced quite a few descendants, but according to Marc Libert it is not in London, but in the county of Surrey. A gift from John Reeves, tea inspector in the 19th century.
Reeves, who worked in Canton China from 1808, had been tasked by the Horticultural Society of London with regularly bringing planting material to London – it was the time of the plant hunters and China was a botanical treasure trove. In 1816, the inspector allowed the mythical two first depositors of the Wisteria sinensis to travel by boat to London. According to renowned garden author James Compton, they then went to two gardener-collectors, one of whom was Charles Hampden Turner. He lived in Shooters Hill, south-east London, and moved to Rooks Nest Park, in Godstone, Surrey, a year later. There, Libert knows, is where the old wisteria still stands, near a country house on a golf course, more or less visible from the street.
The Horticultural Society did have an important nursery in… Chiswick in the 1800s, where Reeves would eventually send hundreds of plants. Did a young plant end up at Fuller’s Griffin a little later? It just might be possible. In any case, the wisteria was an immediate sensation, it was quickly propagated and shipped to the continent.
Gestrand in Baudelopark
Reeves bought his two plants from the Chinese trader Consequa (an Anglicization of Pan Changyao), who in turn got them from the adjacent garden of his cousin Tinqua. Which, in turn, she had probably found 400 miles away in the wild. It’s the real point that Wong says he wanted to make with his Instagram post: how the West, in the rush for exotic plants, has often forgotten that it hasn’t ‘discovered’ anything there. It was all there already, we just took it, got it, bought it, smuggled it.
This also happened in the Netherlands, where they mainly looked for plants in Japan, because they had a privileged trading relationship with it. This is how the Japanese wisteria, Wisteria floribunda, came to attention here. It resembles the Chinese wisteria, but turns counterclockwise instead of right around its support.
In 1830, the Bavarian physician Philipp von Siebold – who had been exiled from Japan after years of collecting – returned with plant material intended for Leiden, including the first plant of the wisteria. “Von Siebold arrived in Belgium and wanted to continue traveling, but because the Belgian revolution had started, it was difficult for him to get away with his material. He deposited his plants in the Baudelo Park, where the botanical garden was located at the time. Ghent was the first place to acquire a Wisteria floribunda,” says Libert.
When Belgium split from the Netherlands, Von Siebold could not simply recover his plants. The nobility and Ghent growers, who were already competing at a world level, would keep some of those plants for themselves. Von Siebold only got his material back ten years later, via cuttings, and started a nursery in Leiden, where he grew Japanese knotweed, among other things. It is suspected that it is the mother of approximately all Japanese knotweed in Europe. They are slightly less enthusiastic about that claim in Leiden.
Splendor and power
Libert has now received a graft from Von Siebold’s wisteria collection from Leiden. From the iconic Wisteria floribunda f. multijuga with its metre-long bunches, he received grafting wood from the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew: the Ghent top grower Louis Van Houtte had grown it in the mid-19th century and donated it to Kew.
The Ghent botanical garden has been too small for all that wisteria love for years. Seventeen years ago, Libert found a home for his collection on the Ten Bieze castle grounds in Beerlegem: the Wisterium was built in the former petit potager, 3,000 square meters in size, which is unique in Europe. Here more than a hundred cultivars grow along the walls, on pergolas, along posts and pedestals or as a shrub with a small support in it. Further on, a fujidana is in the making, a Japanese version of our pergola, from which the tallest wisterias will one day rain down en masse.
A wisteria winds up in a tree at the entrance to the domain – proof of the beauty and strength of the climbing plant, which can grow four meters per year and can easily overgrow or even strangle a tree. Unbridled, but not necessarily invulnerable, we are still learning. For example, the question remains what the wet months have done to the root system of the plants that are grown on wet soil here. “It’s a bit like the story of cathedrals that are 600 or 700 years old: we don’t see everything that has already collapsed. If a fungus creeps into the wisteria, there is nothing you can do about it, they are sometimes completely destroyed in just a few days.”
Two days after our conversation I receive a text message from Marc Libert: “This winter I will receive grafting wood from the oldest wisteria, which I was able to arrange with an English colleague!!!!”
