Category — Vines

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

Twiners and Climbers

I was tying up twine on a trellis for my sweet peas today—a tedious job, but one that pays off, because sweet peas don’t come into glorious bloom unless they have something to twine around.

It took me a long while to find out that there are twiner vines and climber vines, and if you give a vine the wrong support, it sulks. I gave my sweet peas bamboo trellises and they did nothing, despite all my coddling. I finally became enlightened when I bought an old Brooklyn Botanical Garden pamphlet at some library sale or thrift shop. The pamphlet explained that there are twiner vines and climber vines, and they need different types of support. If you don’t give a vine the type of support it needs, then it languishes. That’s why my sweet peas lolled against the bamboo trellises and the cool twine trellises I crocheted them: I wasn’t giving them what they needed.

Sweet peas are twiner vines: they need to spiral themselves around something to grow and thrive. And they need those supports before they are high enough to fall over, or they will never do well.

But as I write this, I’m starting to wonder: sweet peas have tendrils, which would imply that they’re designed to grab on to things, and I know that there are net fences specifically designed for peas. If anyone has the ultimate word on this, I’d be delighted to hear it. All I know is that sweet peas do better for me when they have skinny supports. And I’m not the only one.

Ruth Stout (in my personal garden writer Hall of Fame) talks about growing peas in her Connecticut garden. While her peas were edible, their requirements are the same as sweet peas. And they apparently require the same tedious work for proper support. She describes how she told her friend Scott Nearing that she had to have 240 feet of peas, but she couldn’t face getting the brush for all of them.

When he asked her why she had to have so many peas, she said, “I don’t know.”A man wise in the ways of obsession, he told her not to worry, so she planted the seed, “thinking—well, not thinking, I guess, not trying to figure out what magic Scott had used to keep them from needing brush. He said not to worry and he never used idle words.”One morning she finds him in her garden, putting in a truckload of brush supports for her peas. He’d driven from Vermont to Connecticut to bring them.

This would be my ideal way to support sweet peas. Unfortunately, I don’t have any garden-magician friends, so I’ve resigned myself to spending a few hours tying twine on my trellises every few years. (Hemp twine is strong, looks good in the garden, and lasts in the weather longer than you would think possible for a piece of string. End of commercial.) I’m glad I don’t have to do twine for 240 feet of sweet peas—but that many sweet peas sounds like a wonderful idea–if only I could get somebody else to do the supports. For now I’ll have to rely on audio books to keep me entertained enough to persist for several feet of trellis.

Next post we’ll get into planting times for sweet peas—especially for climates with short springs and hot summers.

References:

Handbook on Vines, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, BBG 1972. The BBG handbooks, past and present, are collections of monographs on a single given subject, written by people who know a lot about the field. No fluff, good pictures, and plenty of information in a small space. (No, I didn’t get paid to write this!)

How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back, Ruth Stout, Cornerstone Library 1976 (reprint), pg. 33-34