Category — Vines

We interrupt our regularly scheduled hollyhock program to bring you this anomaly:

Early this year, we had a spring freeze.

It often comes then. When the fruit trees are just starting to flower. And the wisterias.

This year, these wisterias got cut off just as their first buds were opening. They are the usual Wisteria sinensis, which means they have fat rather rectangular flower clusters, where all the flowers open more or less in a burst.

Wisteria japonica is the variety with the long, long, dripping clusters, sometimes over a foot. They open from the fat top end and then gradually bloom down to the tiny tip. They’re the ones you see on Japanese textiles, and in paintings. I grew one from seed I got from J. L. Hudson, and once I got it past the seedling stage, it wasn’t hard to grow. I’ve never gotten it to flower, though. This year I moved it to where it would get more sun, so maybe next year…

Wisteria really isn’t hard to grow, either sinensis or japonica. In fact, once it gets set in, it can make a bit of a pest of itself, so think about where you put it. I’ve known it to pry shingles off a house and push its way between the wall and the roof until it was growing (not very healthily) inside.

Wisterias like water, so if yours gets to this point, you might be able to starve it to where it doesn’t tear your house down. I’ve also noticed that while wisteria will rapidly take over anything, it also responds nicely to severe pruning. In fact, you make wisteria trees—a beautiful sight in bloom—by skilled severe pruning at certain stages in their lives.

Meanwhile, I’m curious about these particular wisterias. One white, one purple, both taking over the arbor per usual.

I have seen reblooming wisterias once, visiting in a town in a hotter climate, a couple of hours away. (Hot enough so they have oleanders on the freeway: plainly put, it doesn’t freeze.) It was June, and the wisteria was blooming. The people I was visiting said that their wisteria (a sinensis) often flowered again after the first spring bloom. I’d never heard of this; I was inclined to believe that theirs was a special kind of wisteria, a sort of reblooming sport.

Now, while the wisterias in these pictures didn’t exactly rebloom—they didn’t do more than open a few flowers in the first place–they did get into full bud at their usual time early this spring. And here they are in August, buds springing right and left. It looks as if they will shortly be covered in bloom.

Any ideas on how this happened? If there were a way a gardener could encourage this, I’d sure like to know.

Next post: Back to our regularly scheduled raving on hollyhocks.

Just so you know–I will be in the high mountains for the next two weeks. Posts will come up on schedule, but my replies may be absent until my return.

Cucuzzi in the evening.

Cucuzzi in the morning.

Cucuzzi all around: ornamental, fragrant, edible, and a rapid grower.

Because this vine is an edible gourd, it takes the same rich soil, water, and heat that garden squashes do. But its flowers are more delicate, and, like all gourds, white-at least in the evening, when it first opens and gives you a chance to inhale a fresh, gentle fragrance. If you plant them by your door, as I did, they can greet you coming home from work. By morning, they’ve turned a gentle pale tan.

Cucuzzi seeds are different from squash seeds, too: more or less rectangular, with stubby little antennae on each end.

Unlike squash, the smaller leaves of cucuzzi won’t overpower everything else.

In fact, I think they mix quite fetchingly with these Oriental lilies. (I’m a sucker for tendrils.)

I first heard about cucuzzi in The 20-Minute Gardener, Tom Christopher and Marty Asher’s treatise on how not to let gardening take over your life. Gardeners who take things too seriously should be laid in a hammock with this book and a nice glass of lemon balm iced tea.

The only bad thing about The 20-Minute Gardener is that it lacks an index, so I must flip through page after page to find the entry. And after some flipping, I did find one, but not one with the recipe I remembered. Oh well.

These Italian-bred young gourds can be eaten like summer squash. Rumor has it that they are even more flavorful than regular summer squash, but so far I’ve had only male flowers, so I can’t report. I am happy to find a vine that looks as if it’s going over the top of my trellis-shade, fragrant flowers, and fruit all in one season.

And I really like my garden chair.

References:

Tom Christopher and Marty Asher, The 20-Minute Gardener, Random House, 1997

JL Hudson - you can get cucuzzi seeds here.

Yes, reader, they bloomed. In my three-part sweet peas series, I showed my Painted Lady sweet peas in the just-growing stage. Here they are in full flower.

This is not the heaviest possible bloom you can get out of sweet peas. I don’t know if it was my planting timing, the weather (warm-cold-hot-warm), the part-sun aspect, or the fact that Painted Lady is, basically a wild variety that got taken into the garden.

I do know that it’s a wonderful thing to come home to their scent and multiple colors. As you can see, Painted Ladies start out very deep rose on top and white on the bottom. As they age, the top gets paler and the bottom gets flushed so the whole flower winds up the same faded lavender-pink.

I do find that deadheading sweet peas makes the bloom last longer (although we’ve also had a lucky spell of coolish weather instead of the headlong rush into the nineties that we often get this time of year).

There’s always the dilemma, when I save seed, of knowing that letting flowers go to seed stops bloom, but saving seed from the first blooms makes it more likely that you get earlier-blooming flowers next year. I compromise by choosing a couple of vines (earlier-blooming ones) and letting them go to seed. I deadhead the others.

If you’re wondering why I’m not going on about the joys of sweet pea bouquets, that would be because I really don’t have enough of them. My fantasy is to grow fencefuls of early-, mid-, and late-season types. Sweet pea bouquets last only a few days, but they’re soft, fragrant, and wonderful   while they’re there.

I did talk to one of those Real Gardeners I mentioned about sweet peas, and it turns out she also plants in the fall, October or November. She is puzzled as to why her sweet peas–abundant heirloom and new varieties last year–have not done much this year.

Will I plant sweet peas in late summer this year, aiming for the successes of yesteryear? I answer this question with a resounding: I don’t know.

I know. This isn’t a sweet pea. There are only so many ways I can think of to take pictures of emerging sweet pea vines, so I’m showing you one of the things that’s happening in the woods part of the garden: the buckeyes (Aesculus californica) are leafing out. The first leaves to come and the first to go. The beautiful buckeyes are somewhat poisonous, and used to be used for stunning fish (not to impress them; to catch and eat them).

Sweet Peas: what kinds are good and where to get them

The other trick for sweet peas in hot-summer climates is to choose older varieties more closely related to the original Italian wildflower which was brought back to Northern Europe and became the rage (especially in England, where sweet peas seem to be almost a religion. Read an English seed catalogue and you’ll be amazed at the huge number of sweet peas offered. Unfortunately, there are very few places in North America where they will grow easily, since they like cool summers).

These older varieties don’t have the beautiful big flowers of those glorious English hybrids, but they are beautiful, they actually bloom—and they have a stronger fragrance than the later hybrids, which is a good thing in a sweet pea.

Cupani , which I think is the same sweet pea called Matucana, is supposed to be the (or an) original wild form. Or else it’s closely related to an original wild form—these things get lost in the mists of time, and I’m not sure which of the various stories is the straight one. Supposedly, a Father Cupani brought this sweet pea from Sicily to England in the late 1600s, falling in with the tradition that combines gardening with Christian holy orders. (It was, after all, the convents and monasteries that preserved many of the Mediterranean medicinal plants.) Anyway, you can tell by looking at Cupani/Matucana that its small, brilliant blooms were never hybridized by any ambitious grower. They are violet-purple and red-purple, keep going in the heat, and smell like a sensuous heaven—more Islamic paradise than anything in Christendom.

Pink Lady is a medium rose pink sweet pea with a white lip, also supposed to be a near-wild variety. Old Spice is a mix of several of these older varieties, giving you a range of colors and sweet scent. A newer, but still vintage, hybrid mix, Royal Family, lays claim to being heat-resistant, and my experience is that that ‘s true—but they are less hardy in the heat than the other antique kinds.

Royal Family does have the larger flowers most people associate with sweet peas, though, and the colors are varied and beautiful.You may read about perennial sweet peas in some garden catalogues. Usually these are accompanied by photos of these flowers in various colors, which means you’ve entered the land of deception in two ways.

Perennial sweet peas are considered a weed in my area, so I know them well. First off, they aren’t sweet: they have no scent whatever.And while I think they’re quite pretty, especially for a no-care flower, their blooms are mostly bright purple-pink, with a few sports to white and, occasionally, white with a pale pink blush.

A friend of mine once took me to an abandoned orchard which was covered with wild sweet pea vines, and it was a beautiful sight: they were clambering all over the old plum and pear trees, spilling over the ground in thigh-high mounds, in each of the three colors. It was the first time I’d seen the rare blushed-pink version, and I gathered seeds, thinking I’d grow them in my low-water garden, more delicate and subtle than the bright pink-purple.

Alas when I got the seeds in the ground and they came up, they reverted to the purple-pink form, so clearly they aren’t true from seed and what you get is the luck of the draw. Perennial sweet peas are still quite pretty and don’t require water when established (though they may be lusher if you give them some). They stand heat, blooming well into summer. But blossoms picked fade and turn a bruised blue within the hour in the vase, and the flower form is a good deal less delicate than the annual sweet peas. Use perennial sweet peas as a low-water low-maintenance groundcover (they spread but are easy to remove), but don’t expect the heavenly smells and sights of the true sweet pea.

If you want older sweet pea varieties, you can find them at:

locally:

Renee’s Garden seeds—available through your local dealer for instant shipping-free gratification, or at: www.reneesgarden.com

and online:

Cook’s Garden

J. L. Hudson, Seedsman

Select Seeds

Pinetree Garden Seeds

Perennial sweet peas can be found at:

Gurney’s

Pinetree Garden Seeds

more on locating sweet peas: If you have a cooler climate, you’ll be delighted at the selection that Thompson & Morgan has in their catalogue (some are also available through Select Seeds and Renee’s Garden, and I’m sure many British seed companies). I know good gardeners in my area who plant them and come up with fistfuls of good blooms. Maybe I should interview one of them and report back.

Coming Out from the Cold

The first sweet peas I ever saw were growing on my great-aunt’s chain-link fence, an otherwise ugly thing between the driveway and yard of her little L.A. house. It must have been winter, because that’s when sweet peas bloom in L.A. I was three or four years old, so it was a high fence to me, and I looked at sun shining through the pink, purple, and red wings, and wanted to stay there and drink them in as long as I could. I still feel that way about sweet peas. That’s a good thing, because it’s something of a pain to grow sweet peas in my area.

In fact, from what I read from other gardeners, they’re something of a pain to grow in other areas, too. But sweet peas inspire hopeful devotion: we try again, year after year, because when they flourish, sweet peas are a memorable enchantment.

What makes them hard to grow in my area is spring weather that heats up fast. Most sweet peas faint and die in hot weather. Yet they need sun to bloom generously, so you can’t shelter them with semi-shade. For many years, my sweet pea vines died off when they were only a couple of feet high: it just got too hot. I’ll be honest: a lot of years that still happens.

It was procrastination and ignorance that taught me one of the best tricks for sweet peas in hot summers. I planted some really really late in spring. All through the summer, I watered them devotedly (this was before I knew that sweets peas don’t like heat), hoping that somehow they would grow and flourish. They stayed only a few inches high. Not a flower in sight.The payoff came the next spring: peas easily live through freezing weather, and the minute it got warm, they took off like gangbusters, twining all over the twig fence I’d built and blooming like crazy. It’s the best sweet pea year I ever had; they bloomed their heads off for a couple of months and were totally gorgeous.

By accident, I had gotten two things right: I’d planted them so they had a head start in the spring, and I’d given them twigs to twine around.

The moral: if your spring weather heats up quick, the trick is to plant sweet peas at the end of summer, like cool-weather vegetable crops. (You could plant garden peas then, too: they have the same requirements.) Life being life, I have not managed to do this all the time. But if you get sweet peas in while it’s still cold, you’ll give them a head start. Even if it’s freezing or there’s snow on the ground, the peas will be fine. They are polar bears of the temperate plant world.

For warm-winter gardeners, my old Victory Garden book from the forties says peas can be planted all year. (Remember, as far as planting seasons go, edible peas and sweet peas like the same things.) I wish I’d been old enough to find out when my LA great-aunt planted hers. All I know is it’s unlikely to have been summer, because I wasn’t hot standing transfixed on the driveway admiring the sweet peas. I have a hard time believing you could get anything out of sweet peas from hot middle-of-the-summer plantings (unless it works like my accidental planting, and blooms the next cool season). But maybe if you’re one of those Diligent Gardeners who use shade cloths and misting, you could make it work.

I seem to be bringing up a lot of older books in my posts. That’s because I have a lot of second-hand books in my garden library, partly because they are cheap to buy at library and garage sales, and partly because, weirdly enough, there are styles in gardening as there are in other areas. (Cookbooks suffer the same distinction.) So while a newer book may have something an older one doesn’t, the reverse may also be true.

More on sweet peas next post. Feel free to leave a sweet pea comment yourself.

Reference: Vegetables in the California Garden: Victory Garden Edition, Ross H. Gast, Murray & Gee, Inc. 1943, pg. 20