Weigela in Wisconsin

There is a shrub on the north side of my house that I do almost nothing for, and once a year it pays me back like this. For most of the summer it is a perfectly nice green bush minding its own business along the wall. Then early June rolls around and it covers itself, top to bottom, in deep pink trumpet-shaped flowers until you can barely see the leaves. It climbs most of the way up to the eaves. I have walked past it a thousand times, and it still stops me every June. This is a weigela, and it is one of the easiest, most rewarding plants in my whole yard.

If the name does not ring a bell, the plant probably will. Weigela (you say it WY-gee-luh, though half the gardeners I know say wy-JEE-luh and nobody is going to correct you) is one of those old-fashioned shrubs that used to be in everybody’s grandmother’s yard. It is in the honeysuckle family, which makes sense the second you look at the flowers. It is not native here. It comes originally from eastern Asia, China and Korea and Japan, and it got its odd-sounding name from a German botanist named Christian Ehrenfried von Weigel, who has been dead since 1831 and is now mostly remembered because this bush is named after him. It showed up in American gardens in the 1800s and basically never left, because it is gorgeous for two weeks and bombproof for the other fifty.

The flowers are the whole show. Each one is a little funnel, about an inch long, and they come in clusters all along last year’s branches so the entire shrub looks upholstered. Mine are the classic deep rose-pink, which is the old standard color, though weigela also comes in white, pale pink, and a red so dark it is almost wine. Here is the part I like best: those tube-shaped flowers are built for hummingbirds. A hummingbird’s bill slides right down into that funnel, and weigela is one of the plants they will reliably come check. Bees and butterflies work it over too. If you have ever wanted to give the hummingbirds a reason to hang around your yard, a weigela in bloom is about as close to a guarantee as gardening gets.

There is one thing worth knowing if you grow one, and it is the mistake almost everybody makes. Weigela blooms on old wood, meaning the flowers form on branches that grew the year before. So if you get the urge to tidy it up with a good hard pruning in fall or early spring, you are cutting off this year’s flowers before they ever open, and then you stand there in June wondering why your bush is just a green blob. The trick is simple: if you want to prune it, do it right after it finishes blooming, in late June or early July. That gives it the rest of the summer to grow the new wood that becomes next spring’s flowers. Honestly, the easiest approach is the one I use, which is to leave it almost completely alone and let it do its arching, slightly wild thing.

For Wisconsin, weigela is just about a perfect fit. It is hardy down to USDA zone 4, which means it shrugs off our winters without any fuss or wrapping or babying. Up here around Neenah we get the kind of cold that kills off a lot of prettier, fussier shrubs, and this one does not care. The books will tell you weigela wants full sun for the heaviest bloom, and that is true, which is what makes mine a little funny. It is on the north side of the house, the shady side, the side that is supposed to give you a weak, leggy plant with a few sad flowers. Instead it has grown straight up toward the light and bloomed its head off anyway. I think it gets enough of the long, low morning and evening sun we get in June this far north to keep it happy. Either way, it clearly did not read the books.

One more practical note, since this is a dog house as much as it is a people house. I went and checked, because the dogs are out in that yard constantly and you can never be too careful, and weigela does not show up on the toxic-to-pets lists the way a lot of common landscape plants do. That is a relief, and it is a nice change of pace from the mushrooms that came up in this same yard a couple days ago, which I would not let a Shih Tzu within ten feet of. The weigela I can just enjoy. I am still not going to encourage anybody, two-legged or four-legged, to start eating the landscaping, but I sleep a little easier knowing the biggest bush on the north wall is a friendly one.

I have been pointing a camera at this yard for a lot of years now, and the weigela is one of those quiet regulars that earns its spot without ever asking for anything. No spraying, no feeding, no fussing. It just sits there being green, and then for two weeks every June it turns into the best-looking thing on the property and pulls in the hummingbirds while it is at it. If you have a bare, shady wall you have been ignoring and you want one plant that will reward you for doing nothing, this is the one I would point you at. Mine has been holding down the north side for years, and as far as I can tell it plans to keep doing it long after I have stopped being surprised by it. Which, clearly, is never.