Wisteria frutescens

For its first sixty-five years in the books, this vine was filed as a kind of soybean. Linnaeus named it Glycine frutescens in 1753, frutescens meaning "turning shrubby," and there it sat until 1818, when Thomas Nuttall looked again, decided a woody climber of the southern riverbanks deserved a genus of its own, and christened it for his friend Caspar Wistar, the Philadelphia anatomist. Somewhere between the man and the plant a vowel slipped, Wistar becoming Wisteria, and the misspelling has outlived everyone involved in making it.

This is the wisteria of the Southeast, native from Virginia down through the Carolinas and Georgia to Florida and west to Texas, threading the margins of swamps, bottomland woods, and slow water. They do everything the Asian wisterias do, but with manners. The flower clusters are shorter and denser, lilac-blue with a fleck of yellow at the throat, and they arrive in early summer on the current season's growth, after the leaves are out rather than before, so the bloom comes cradled in green instead of strung on bare wood. They twine counterclockwise, flower within a couple of years instead of making you wait a decade, and, the part that matters most, they don't bolt for the canopy and strangle it the way their Asian cousins have quietly learned to do across the South.

A native that gives you the whole romance of wisteria, the drooping racemes, the soft drift of scent, without the fifty-year campaign to take back your porch. There is very little reason to plant the other one.

Standing on: Linnaeus named it Glycine frutescens in 1753; in 1818 Thomas Nuttall recognized it as distinct and coined Wisteria for Caspar Wistar, a Philadelphia physician and anatomist; frutescens means shrubby. It is native to the southeastern U.S. (Virginia to Texas and Florida), blooms on new wood, and is not invasive, unlike the Asian species, which can girdle mature trees and form monocultures. It blooms after the foliage emerges, a little later than the Asian species, twines counterclockwise, and flowers at about two years' maturity versus five-plus for Asian wisteria. Flowers are fragrant, lilac-purple with a yellow spot.