Wisteria has been a decorator's plant since the first specimens reached Europe from China in the early nineteenth century, and Egerton is one of the older British interpretations of it. The design is a tree rather than a trail: a trunk and a set of branches that climb the drop, with the racemes hanging from them in the long, heavy way the plant actually flowers.
It is printed on a china clay ground, which gives the paper a chalky, slightly absorbent surface and takes any shine out of the colour. The blossoms are drawn as loose clusters of small petals, so at a distance they soften into a haze along the branch and only resolve as you approach the wall. The effect is closer to a painted panel than to a repeating paper, which accounts for a good deal of its appeal. Older colourways and newer ones alike keep that chalky ground, so the design never reads as a modern print.
Bedrooms take it best, where a climbing plant on the wall is a pleasure to wake to, and it is equally at home in a garden room or a first-floor drawing room with tall windows. Keep the rest plain, with linen, matting and painted furniture, and let the tree do the work.
