Help! I think my Wisteria is Dead

Feeling very sad at the minute as our once wonderful Wisteria suddenly dried up and may have died. I don't think there is anything I can do to save it, so wondering if anyone can suggest the next steps / best course of action I should take?

I suspect the plant has died from severe crown / root rot. The ground in this part of the garden is historically waterlogged through winter, so I wonder if the Wisteria has struggled with it over the years (it's age is somewhere north of 25 years old). This year it flowered the best it ever has since we took over the garden 5 years ago. I had wondered about graft failure as a possibility, as there are new sucker like shoots coming out of the ground from around the base, however, the leaves do not resemble the main Wisteria - and I hear this type of growth won't be anything like the main Wisteria.

Bizzarely, over the last month during the heat, everyone (including neighbours) could smell a heavy rotting decayed smell in the air. It could be detected in a 50 metre radius, but nobody could figure out where it was coming from. This smell wasn't obviously stronger around the Wisteria, so I now wonder if this smell was from rotting roots underground?

What should I do - cut down the old Wisteria and dig out its stump? Should I treat the soil in someway? Any advice welcome… Thank you.

 

Anyone have any useful thoughts? Thank you.

 

I don’t know anything about Wisterias but I have seen other plants perform a spectacular flowering swansong and then die. My Clematis montana did it a couple of years ago. almost as if they know they are going to snuff it and are trying to produce seeds to continue that way.

 

Hi

oddly my 22 year old wisteria died this spring just decided not to grow , past couple of years it has really bloomed and grew strongly I even asked on here would it be ok to grow in to a established weeping willow as it wanted to head that way but alas it wont happen …I don’t have any suckers from the base like yourself and yes the leaves may be different as 99% are all grafted plants so the rootstock will be a different variety to the one that was growing and flowering..
what to do ? See what the others say

Spruce

 

I can't help either but if you hadn't have mentioned rotting roots I would have thought maybe it was drought. Wisteria like water and in bonzai they often sit them in a tray of water over the summer. I'm guessing that wet in the growing period is better than wet in the dormant period.
If it is reshooting then it might not be root related at all and it's just, as you suggest, the graft has died.

 

I doubt very much if rotting roots would smell that much.
I agree with @Thevictorian that it's more probably drought conditions, it looks quite a hefty wisteria. My wisteria produces those long shoots at the base every year which I just cut off as not needed.
I would give it a long soak with a hosepipe before you decide to get rid of it to see if that perks it up.
If that doesn't work within say a week, and bearing in mind your comment about the heavy flowering this year, then yes, I'm afraid it may well be on it's way out.

 

The same thing happened to my old wisteria, it was quite old. The branches all rotted but it made new shoots at the base so I trained them up and removed the rotten bits. Eventually it grew up again, strong and beautiful. The original flowers were double but the new flowers were single on very long racemes. They must have been the flowers below the graft from the root stock.

I was looking at April's Gardeners World magazine this morning and it mentioned this in the Gardeners' Question Time section. Matt Biggs, who trained at Kew, told someone to remove the dead bit and let the new bit grow. He said the flowers would be different.

I don't think the rotting smell was the wisteria, more likely to be a dead animal somewhere.

This is what mine turned into.

 

I suppose its a possible cause or contributor. The only reason I doubt lack of water is how moist the soil is a few inches down in this region of the garden. Everything else around the Wisteria is doing fine.

 

Thank you Lizzie. It's worth trying before I take drastic action and cut it all back.

 

My reservation for letting the new shoots grow is how I've heard they won't be the same plant and most likely will become more invasive and hard to train. Your plant is looking nice again, but would you say its become more of a handful? No harm in letting mine grow to see what happens.

No rotting animals to be found (the foxes seem to take care of that). I did find a very large white 20cm diameter puff ball type mushroom near the greenhouse. But once removed and in a bag, this had no obvious smell. And physically didn't resemble a stink horn mushroom. As of yesterday, I'd say its possible to only just detect this rotting smell. What ever it is/was is almost vanished.

 

As others have said it can't be a root problem as its shooting from the root which also suggests it's not a drought problem.
I tend to think that the graft may have got some disease into it, probably not apparent until this happened.
I have a grafted laburnum which has pretty much died this year after leafing out and flowering, but I knew it had a disease as the wood changed colour further down the trunk, it was pretty much just flowering on stored energy.