The June Garden
“It is the month of June, the month of leaves and roses, when pleasant sights salute the eyes and pleasant scents the noses,” wrote American writer and editor Nathaniel Parker Willis. Certainly, the roses have had a good year and my garden is at its most fragrant at Midsummer as a result but the scent of June for me is and always has been the Sweet Pea. Not a flower you can find readily in the shops, due to its short shelf-life which makes it all the more special.
There was always a jam jar of sweet peas on the kitchen table in June when I was a girl, sweetly scented and in the most delightful shades of crimson, pink and purple. Picking them from the wigwam in the garden was an almost daily occurrence. The more you pick, the more blooms you have. Like a floral version of the magic porridge pot, without the sticky ending. My mother used to trade a bunch of Sweet Peas for a bag of tomatoes grown in a neighbour’s greenhouse. My job was to walk up the lane in the evening after school and perform the swap.
My mother had no issues growing Sweet Peas. Few people seem to, provided that you take account of their voracious appetite. Few except me. Since we moved to a new garden, my success with sweet peas has been patchy, despite my assiduous attention to them at every stage. They just don’t seem to love this garden. We’ve just come back from a trip to Dorset and two flower farms we visited had plenty of blooms growing in their beds as well as the odd escapee winding its way up the fence on the edge of the plot. I think one of these was a particular and recent favourite of mine (Heathcliff). “They are so easy to grow,” said the flower farmer. “Those sprung up after I tipped a tray of old compost away last October”. The irony wasn’t lost on me.
Sweet Peas have a long and rich backstory. Not many people know that the first sweet peas were actually found growing wild on the island of Sicily in Italy. It was Sicilian monk, Franciscus Cupani in 1699 who sent seeds to various institutions and plant collectors; some came to Dr Robert Uvedale in Britain. In 1793 seedsman John Mason, of Fleet Street described five varieties but it was Henry Eckford who created many of the sweet peas we grow today. He’s one of my heroes. Having worked as a gardener all his life he set up his own business (a plant nursery) at age 65 and dedicated the rest of his life to improving and expanding the small band of varieties then available. More refiring than retiring. Eckford succeeded in increasing the size of the delicate flowers and expanding the range of colours.
The growers who came after him (notably Silas Cole and William Unwin) bred varieties with even larger and more frilly flowers and longer stems. In the past few decades, there have been even more developments – dwarf varieties (good for containers), early ones to August for flowering in early spring, and late ones to sow in July which will flower at Christmas. And of course, every year at Chelsea new varieties of Sweet Pea appear. Nigel Slater’s Fruit Fool and Black Magic were a particular hit this year. To fully geek out on Sweet Peas, Seedlynx in Essex is the place to look. Described as the “living library of Sweet Peas”, they trial new varieties from all around the world and maintain stock seed and the quality of many vintage and much-loved varieties. The owner is also President of the National Sweet Pea Society, inevitably.
I am well-versed in the best ways to grow this fragrant flower, honed from my years of relatively little success. I know some people sow the seeds on Valentine’s Day (alongside pruning their roses) but I’ve had more success sowing in Autumn and overwintering in a cold frame. Whenever you do it, they need root trainers, 9cm pots or cardboard tubes because the plants produce long taproots, so they need depth to develop properly. The seeds have a tough outer coat so soaking them in water for 24 hours dramatically increases the germination rate. When seedlings are about 3 or 4 inches tall, pinch out the growing tip just above a leaf node. This encourages bushier growth, better branching, and more flowers.
Once your flowers are blooming there are a few simple things you can do to prolong the season, get the most flowers and stop the stems from shortening too much.
1. Cut the flowers every day or so. Leave them on the plant and they will inevitably form seed pods. Making seeds is all that the plant wants to do, the flowers are a byproduct, so once the seeds are safely ripening the plants, reproduction in sight, will lose interest in flowering.
2. Snip off tendrils and old leaves. Tendrils are the way that Sweet Peas climb but they are just as happy to curl around a flower stem as they are around a support so they can end up bending stems over and twisting them. Cutting them off means more tying in though. More effort but those extra flower stems are worth it. They are hungry and thirsty plants and a lot of that demand comes from the large leaves. If you cut off any large leaves that have gone slightly dusty looking, you allow the nutrients and water to get to the new growth and flowers.
3. Friday feed. They really benefit from regular feeding. In the wild they would produce one flush of flowers that would form seeds and then they would die back. We demand week after week after week of flowers. Keeping feeding to a particular day of the week makes me more likely to remember. A watering can with some diluted seaweed or comfrey in it is perfect to give them a good soak.
4. Cut more of the plant. Inevitably stems will get shorter as the season goes on as the plant economises on making stem tissue and concentrates on the flower instead in an effort to produce seeds in time for them to ripen. At that point of the year, I cut whole lengths of stem - leaves and tendrils as well as flowers and simply have wilder, greener bunches.
I managed to cut a small bunch of Wiltshire Ripple Sweet Peas this year to mark the anniversary of my Mum’s death and at the same time direct sowed a few seeds to bloom later in the season, giving myself maximum chance of success. Sweet Peas are teaching me observation, persistence and patience. My approach to many plants is ‘tough love’; so perhaps it’s time to just lean into that rather than mollycoddle my Sweet Peas,