By Jill Severn
This week I escaped from worry about omicron by dreaming about sweet peas. It’s been a very helpful strategy for seeing beyond gray cold skies, too.
Sweet peas, in case you’ve forgotten or never knew, smell like heaven. There is no better way to wake up in the morning than to walk into a room with a fresh bouquet of them on the breakfast table. It’s a wonderful thing to look forward to.
We have a Scottish gardener and plant breeder to thank for our sweet peas. According to our friends at Wikipedia, “Henry Eckford (1823 – 1905) cross-bred and developed the sweet pea, turning it from a rather insignificant if sweetly scented flower into a floral sensation of the 19th century.” He did this “while serving as head gardener for the Earl of Radnor.” He was awarded the Royal Horticulture Society Victoria Medal of Honor for his work.
He did this in a town called Wem, in Shropshire. Since a resurgence of sweet pea popularity in the 1980s, its Sweet Pea Society holds an annual show, and street signs in Wem feature a sweet pea motif.
The fact that there is a Sweet Pea Society is a noteworthy feature of the human species. I dream of a world where more people are members of Sweet Pea Societies than the Proud Boys or Antifa.
Sweet peas are easy to grow, once you get the seeds to come up. They want to be planted in a sunny spot in March or April, and they need to be planted by someone who is not in a hurry for them to sprout, and willing to replant if they fail the first time. Their occasional reluctance to germinate is sweet peas’ only character flaw; it has earned them a reputation for fussiness they don’t deserve.
Like most varieties of edible peas, sweet peas need something to climb – something they can wind their little tendrils around. Bird netting strung up on a frame is ideal. (Mine grow up my neighbor’s ugly chain link fence, effectively hiding it for most of the summer.)
Sweet peas like a sunny spot, but if the weather gets very hot, they’d be grateful for afternoon shade. However, last year mine survived the June heat wave and bloomed until early October – a much longer run than their typical fade-out in August. Like the peas we eat, sweet peas are typically averse to mid-summer heat, so their behavior was a pleasant surprise.
But don’t eat sweet peas. If your child eats a few, don’t worry, but too many over a period of time will mess with your body’s ability to make collagen, which will make your skin saggy. (However, living a long time will do the same thing.)
In my experience, the lightest colors of sweet peas are the most fragrant, though no garden reference I’ve read says so. Heirloom varieties are typically more fragrant than new ones, which are bred for longer stems and bigger flowers for the benefit of the floral arrangers. There are also dwarf varieties that grow shorter vines than sweet peas’ typical five- to eight-feet height. (In 1981 in Harare, Zimbabwe, I saw a planting in full bloom that was twelve feet tall – a sure sign that British colonizers had been there, possibly with their head gardeners.)
If you want to search online, you can find many varieties; if you don’t, you can find a larger variety of seeds at a nursery than at the grocery store in early spring. One hint: multifloras have smaller, more fragrant flowers than grandifloras. There is no law against mixing them together and planting both.
So here is my wish for your holidays: When all the grownups are snug in our beds, may visions of sweet peas dance in our heads.
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December 25, 2021 at 09:18AM
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Dreaming of sweet peas | THE JOLT NEWS ORGANIZATION, A WASHINGTON NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION - The Jolt News
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