A few days of sun and the "Macrobotrys" wisteria is showing that it knows its name. The flower chains are getting more "macro" by the minute.
They've lengthened time and again, exchanging their former scary-big caterpillar look for a Mannerist over-elongated impressivity of, well, deep and ever-deeper dangling. What will this lead too? How much lower can they go?
The vine has released itself into a solipsistic orgy of "Yup, I am amazing!" It's taken all that earlier discipline, doubled-down, and, without revenge or remorse, gone straight into exuberance. Amazing indeed.

Wisterias are as much Spring as daffodils. Long chains of fragrant flowers, truly in unprecedented, unstinting abundance. Like so many other Spring-blooming plants: fruit trees, magnolias, and, yes, daffodils. Flowers in Summer, Fall, and Winter are comparatively harder-won, and so the greater victory and value. But still, Spring is when the flowers leer out at us, with near assaultive intensity. Once a year, what the hell: Everyone can have a garden full of flowers, not just the hard-working, the big-spending, the deeply-experienced, and the esoterically-entranced.
Wisteria can be a part of Spring's rampant, even careless, floral shock troops. Racing to the top of trees as well as houses, running out along the ground twenty feet in all directions, looking for another victim to smother. It's a mighty python of a vine that will crush your pergola, remove the shutters from your windows, and then get to work on the clapboards too. Wisteria flowers are incredible, but if they're on an out-of-control monster, it's fool's gold to keep the plant alive. Saw it down to a stump and then kill the sprouts with Round-Up.
But is wisteria therefore, deep down and bred-in-the-bone, a bad-spirited beauty? Twisted, yes (but you knew that: It's a twiner.) But not bad. Wisteria is really just a big masochist. All of that acting-out is just a cry for help to the sadist it so dearly craves—you, the gardener—to come along and prune it radically, frequently, and without mercy. What a delicious relationship to begin cultivating. And if you do, your wisteria will show gratitude by begging to please you even more—by putting out more buds than it ever did on its own wide-ranging, neighborhood-terrorizing recognizance.
I've been Mr. Toughie with all of my wisterias since they were still in diapers, and I'm proud to say we've all getting along very nicely. The proof? Here's the variety with the longest flower chains—to three feet, even four I'm told—showing me that it's Life Mission is only to please me more. Look at all those buds, those emerging flower clusters.
"Macrobotrys" is the cultivar in question. "Macro" clearly means big; "botrys" means (I'm guessing; my horticultural dictionary—yes, the actual physical book—is in RI) flowers-in-long-chains. So "macrobotrys" means the longest of the long. Plausible, right? Very: there's also a tropical vine, Strongylodon macrobotrys, with staggering long chains of flowers too. Or maybe "macrobotrys" just means "Jeez, look at the size of those things." (Get strongylodon at Logee's.) Plausible too.
I've never seen at strongylodon vine in bloom (sigh), so I don't know what their buds look like. Wisteria's can look, at first, like an infestation of some horrible huge caterpillar as thick as your thumb, and getting, by the hour,
longer and longer...
...and longer...
...and more full of "impendingness", of promise that a lot is going to happen, and soon.
I'm back in RI in 36 hours, which will be, oh, 3 - 4 days after these pictures were taken. How long with the bud clusters be then? How much more "macro"? I love when a vine is going to unprecedented lengths, literally, to please me.