Ah, 100 degrees yesterday, and just about that today. Time to do anything that must be done in the shade. Like—lookey here!—hanging around under the Red Garden pergola, with this display of amazing wisteria pods.
Oh yes, wisteria pods. The vine is a huge woody cousin of garden peas, which get pods too. With edible seeds inside. (The peas you ninny.) Wisteria seeds aren't edible, but wisteria pods have it all over pea-pods for visuals: Six inches long, with a hard, velvety-suede green shell.
And dangling from the flower-cluster stem that, in this variety at least...

...can be one, ...two, ...three,
....even four feet long. Now that's a dangle. But the real shocker isn't that there's one or two such pods on most of the flower stems.
In bloom, each stem has a couple of hundred flowers in voluptuous pendancy.

Why then aren't there a couple of hundred wisteria pods on each stem, not one or two. (Each flower that is successfully pollinated matures to a single pod with, yes, however many seeds in it. One flower : one pod.) Maybe those gorgeous seductive flowers aren't very fertile. Or maybe because this is a Chinese wisteria, there isn't quite the right species of insect to pollinate it here in North America? More likely: The plant doesn't want hundreds of seed pods on one flower stem because their combined weight would, surely, rip the flower stem right off the vine long before any one of the pods had matured to viable seeds.
In any event, no one ever breeds wisteria for a better crop of pods. The breeding is all about larger flowers in longer clusters in more unusual colors. The pods, such as they are, are just what happens afterwards.
Garden peas, by contrast, are all about the quantity of pods and the peas in each. It's the reverse priority from wisteria: pea flowers are only the means to those oh-so-desirable—and—delicious pea pods. No wonder, then, that garden peas are comparatively prolific "podders".
It also helps that garden peas are annuals; any one plant lives for only a few months. So if you don't produce plenty of peas—all the peas that your human gardeners might ever want—they'll plant some other variety of pea next year, and you'll be history. Wisteria, by contrast, can live for generations. And even one vine has the potential to grow into a monster that ate the whole neighborhood. With that longevity and a Napoleonic, even Hitlerian, sense of entitlement when it comes to more and more real estate, who cares about producing seeds? They'd only sprout into puny seedlings that would take years and years to grow into anything the size of the parent. By which time the parent had gotten twice as big anyway. Wisteria pods? We're lucky to see them at all.

Sometimes classic is, well, classical: Timesless, satisfying in any age—at any age—and in any style.
Years ago I misjudged what a particular client would like, and so wound up, happily, owning a trio of pencil-thin yews. Handsome in their own right, yes, but also perfect scaffolding for a particular clematis, Lady Murasaki.
Sure, the flowers are stunning.
Every blue clematis is stunning. Lady Murasaki isn't just a beauty, though, she's a cosmopolite. (Thank goodness she ain't named Big Bertha from Biloxi.) She fits in to the local culture, even though she never looks anything but her best all the while. Does she grow bigger and bigger, year by year? Of course not: Then she'd swamp the yews, shading them out at worst, or growing over them into a quivering clematisy haystack—albeit one with stunning blue flowers—at best. No way for a Lady to behave.
But instead, Lady M consents to be pruned down in earliest Spring, right to the lowest leaf buds. Yes, then, down to a foot or less. (This makes her a Group B clematis. Group A's don't need to be pruned at all, and Group C's are a disaster unless you prune them in Spring ruthlessly. Group B's swing both ways. If you want them more compact, prune in the Spring. If not, they grow larger and larger, but still bloom beautifully.)
Lady M thanks me immediately for my attention, putting out joyful shoots that race to the top of the yew, but not much farther...
...and are covered in those same stunning blue flowers. Some years Lady M is so happy about all of this that she flowers again in September, after the high Summer heat has broken, the nights are starting to cool, and she can collect her thoughts again.
Eventually, the yews will get so tall—ten feet, even fifteen—that Lady M will only be able to frisk them as high as their, shall we say, beltloops. I'll still do her Spring pruning, otherwise she would have very long skinny legs with narry a flower until six feet or more off the ground. And that's no way for me to treat a Lady.
And besides, if I'm faithful to her in my pruning, she'll be faithful to me in her compact and floriferous growth.  When the yews are twelve feet tall, the effect will still be marvelous: they'll look like a psychedelic boy- band from the 60's in blue-flowered pants. Hmmm: Boy-bands in blue-flowered pants: I need that in my garden. You too, yes?

The front of the carriage house faces East, so it misses the hot afternoon sun. What plants are happy with just morning sun? European honeysuckle for one.
It will grow to twenty feet, handles shade or sun... (thank you Clematis.Com for the pic)  
...and has a huge and showy crop of fragrant trumpets.

Thank you Luc Viator for the sparkling pic. It twines, so needs something to climb on. Simple & sturdy is best because the vine will quickly hide the structure under a thick canopy of foliage. i
I fixed a pair of thick rebars to the fascia (the underside of a roof's overhang), anchoring them informally in the ground. Then I wired cross pieces every three feet up, making a huge honeysuckle-friendly ladder. In three or four years, I bet the honeysuckle will have gotten right to the top.
Oh yes: That's not a gravestone at the bottom. When we bought our property, we found this monument (it has a bronze plaque of the prior house-owners, back to the 18th C) leaning against, almost into the wall of the living room. Here by the carriage house it's a bit (but just) more stable.

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.