Wildly wonderful wisteria can quickly become wild and wicked wisteria. Reader Alicia writes, “when is the best time of year to prune wisteria?”
Taming the wisteria (before photo). The first photo shows what the ancient wisteria (Wisteria sinensis) looked like when first I took over the gardens at Willowdale Estate. I removed much of the plant and bent one long trunk over and down, attaching it to a thick bamboo stake, to create the wisteria “arch.” The next photo shows what the wisteria arch looked like by mid-summer that same year.
Alicia asks: “Much to my surprise the wisteria is blooming and has never been this late. I really gave up on it and am wondering why? When is the best time to prune it?”
Hi Alicia,
Wisteria throughout our region bloomed later than usual I think becasue spring got off to such a slow start this year.
Wisteria grows beautifully and is easiest to control when pruned biannually, or twice a year; a summer pruning and a winter pruning.
Summer Pruning: Cut the long shoots after the flowers fade to about six inches.
Winter Pruning: In late winter, before the buds begin to swell, prune all the shoots that have since grown after the summer pruning. The shape of the leafless wisteria is more clearly visible and you can easily see the unruly, long shoots at this time of year. Cut the branches to about 3 to 5 buds and over time, these shortened flowering branches will resemble a wisteria “hand.”
Photo submitted by Alicia Mills
Good Morning Gloucester 
No shortage of wrok here I see and the outcome is beautiful you did well! As a young lad I had fun doing the lawns and general labor around Manship estate lanesville with quarry pits on both sides one we swam in with permission and the other was more of a very large pond…:-) Dave & Kim:-)
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Thanks Dave–I would have loved to have met Paul Manship!
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Him and Margret his wife were both very nice loved the Pears he grew on the estate and the also his son John…Found this in a quick googel search. brother has the picture of Bear’s by quarry I believe when he went back that way to visit when I was here in South Korea 80’s sometime.
PAUL MANSHIP
American, I885-1966
Group of Bears
Bronze
Cast in 1963
Height, 88 in. (223.5 cm)
Purchase, Sheila W. and Richard J. Schwartz Fund,
in honor of Lewis I. Sharp, I989
I989.I9
For over twenty years Paul Manship’s Group of Bears
stood outdoors on the sculptor’s estate near Gloucester,
Massachusetts. Manship had originally modeled the three
bears from life in 1932 as individual figures in the round for
one of the lunettes of the Paul J. Rainey Memorial Gateway
at the New York Zoological Park (the Bronx Zoo). In 1939
these figures were regrouped on a self-base to face in one
direction, the sitting bear on the left, the standing bear in
the center, and the walking bear on the right, and a reduced
cast was made. The sculptor returned to this work in I952,
when he incorporated the three bears in his design for the
William Church Osborn Memorial Playground Gateway in
New York’s Central Park. Manship’s life-size Group of Bears
in the Museum’s collection was cast for the artist in 1963 at
the Artistica Battaglia & Company Foundry, Milan, Italy.
This monumental composition is characteristic of the sculptor’s
highly personal style, which evolved from his study of
the art of preclassical Greece, early medieval Europe, and
the Far East.
Although Manship is better known for his mythological
subjects, such as the gilded Prometheus Fountain in New
York’s Rockefeller Center, he was an accomplished animalier,
having been trained early in his career in the basic principles
of anatomy by the sculptor Solon H. Borglum. Like many of
Manship’s animal sculptures, Group of Bears is simplified in
form; the roundness of this particular subject is delightfully
exaggerated, with only the necessary delineation of detail to
capture the nature of the ursine personality.
In addition to this heroic outdoor sculpture, the Museum
received Manship’s small 1930 bronze Bellerophon and
Pegasus (1988.416) as the gift of Thelma Williams Gill to the
collection of twentieth-century art.
DJH
ProvenanceT: he artist’s home and studio, Lanesville Near Gloucester,
Massachusetts, until I987.Ex coll.: The artist until 1966; John Manship (his son) until 1987;
[Graham Gallery, New York, I987-89].
BibliographyT: he Animali n SculptureA: mericana nd European
Igth and 20th Century (exhib. cat.), New York, Graham Gallery,
1987, front and back cover (illus.), pp. 62-63, 84.
Related references: Edwin Murtha, Paul Manship, New York, 1957;
Paul Manship: Changing Taste in America (exhib. cat.), May I9-
August I8, 1985, Saint Paul, Minnesota Museum of Art, p. 82;
M. Gayle and M. Cohen, The Art Commission and the Municipal
Art Society Guide to Manhattan’s Outdoor Sculpture, New York,
I988, p. 228.
55
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Thanks Dave for posting all this great info on Paul Manship!!!
Did you mean that your brother has a photo of the bears by the quarry?
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