Gardening Group - the Wisteria

Jackwood House Garden and Terrace

7 November 2025

It's definitely not summer anymore. Tucked away in corners of the new beds at Jackwood House garden, we're starting to see our winter flowering plants coming into their own!

Hellebore coming into flower

Cyclamen coming into flower

Six of our volunteers spent a grey and drizzly afternoon hard at work in the garden. While some of the group puttered around in the flowerbeds planting some extra bulbs and tidying up a little bit, three brave souls carried on with our most mammoth task to date - the wisteria.

Two years ago, we cut half of the wisteria back quite hard. We were still flat out between Jackwood House garden and the rose garden below the castle, and we only had one session in the year on the terrace. We chopped as much as we could, taking out dead wood, bramble, old mans beard, nettle and litter. We shrank the sycamore as much as we could. And what felt like 10 minutes later, you couldn't tell that we'd been by.

Last year, with the rose garden much more under control and plans afoot for Jackwood, we gave ourselves one session on the wisteria. We chopped away at the other half and yet again, you couldn't tell that we'd been by only a little while later. This time, though, we did start seeing decent flower on the plant over the summer.

Pruning the wisteria at Jackwood House Garden

This winter, with the rose garden and the beds at Jackwood being reasonably behaved, we've been able to put in a more serious amount of effort into the wisteria. We've trimmed from the top; we've trimmed the left side. This session one of our team went back to the sycamore and cut it back hard.

The rest of the team got going on cutting back the vines on the right side, digging out the bramble and poking around to see what dead wood we had remaining. Fingers crossed, we may yet prune the whole of the wisteria this winter!