My one year old wisteria vine did not do well this spring; the buds were looking great but they all froze and died on me. I cut my wisteria back to about 18 inches, so no flower for me this year!

Do you find that your Chinese wisteria is invasive to your garden? I live in the same zone and was thinking of buying the Chinese Wisteria but after reading about it, was wondering if I should go with the Kentucky Blue Moon.

I don't find it invasive - because I don't let it be so! First and foremost, I grow it as a 'tree'. That helps in many ways I think - very easy to control its size as it is easier to prune than it would be if you dad to climb around on a tall pergola!; growing it as a tree in a bed - or on a lawn - makes it easier to see and remove root suckers as they arise (rip the sucker off rather than cutting them off when whenever possible as ripping them off the roots can remove the budwood that gives rise to more sucker at the same site on the root....); keeping the size of the plant small seems to help limit the size of the root system the plant wants to grow (in the first 5-7 years I was getting 5-6 root suckers a year; after that point I've been getting maybe one every other year! The rate of suckering on the younger Japanese wisteria has started to slow now too.) The second major thing I do to deal with the potential for invasiveness is to remove every seed pod that develops! Once the leaves drop in the fall, they are easy to see and remove. Keeping the plant small in a tree form also makes it easier to access and remove the pods. My basic approach to growing these can be summed up as prune, prune, prune! You see pruning instructions in various places on the internet. They are usually very picky/detailed re 'cut back to specific places at specific times of year'. Too fussy for me! I cut all the whippy new growth back into the structure/size I want to limit it to. I cut it back weekly (sometimes more than once!) throughout the summer. That seems to promote flowering wood development, often resulting in flowers appearing throughout the summer at a pruned site, abut two weeks after a whippy growth has been pruned back. Every couple of years I do an additional hard prune to reshape and shrink the size a bit more. That, like last year's hard prune, sometimes cuts off enough of the established flowering wood to result in a disappointing spring bloom the following year. I grow Henryi clematis into the Chinese one to provide some additional flowers through the summer. It's a clematis that doesn't need a hard prune so there's little risk of damaging the wisteria flowerbuds that trying to give a hard prune to a group 3 type clematis in spring.would involve!

Thanks for that info!