Sweet Peas

In the language of flowers, Sweet Peas mean "blissful pleasure".  These early Summer blooms have an ethereal fragance, that is delicate and sweet, yet, powerful enough to evoke distant memories of warm Summer mornings.  

I bought this small bouquet last Saturday, at the local farmers' market, here in Toronto.  The transluscent blossoms were beautifully displayed in simple Mason jars.  The young farmer was especially proud of the variegated sweet peas he had imported as seeds, from a grower in the Pacific Northwest. I was sold, just inhaling the fragrance of the bouquet.  

Sweet peas are grown from seed each year.  In cold climates, the seeds are started indoors in late Winter, and transplanted in late Spring.  In the South, gardeners sow sweet peas after Labour Day, and they grow in the Spring. 

A climbing vine with delicate tendrils, sweet peas grow best if they have something to cling to.  They will grow taller than most basketball players, if they have string, netting or a fine trestle to climb. They love sunshine!  Plant them in a place that gets full sun to part shade, in rich, well drained soil, and they'll rise to the occasion.     

Sweet peas are an old fashioned flower, popular during Queen Victoria's reign.  The Queen of England loved them, and so did the "queen of the house", in every home, on every street and country lane in North America.

Although we think of sweet peas as British or American, they originated in Italy.  In 1695, Franciso Cupani, who may or may not have been a monk with the Order of St. Francis, was caring for their botanical garden in Misilmeri, not far from Palermo, Sicily, when he discovered a new plant.  He named it, Lathyrus distoplatyphylos, hirsutus, mollis, magno et peramoeno, flare ororo, or in simpler terms, fragrant (odoratus) pea (lathryrus).

While the fragrance is intoxicating, the flower is a neurotoxin.  Perhaps it was Dr. Casper Commelin, a botanist of the School of Medicine in Amsterdam, Netherlands who discovered that.  Who knows. Dr. Commelin was one of the international botanists who received the seeds of the newly discovered plant from Cupani.  In 1701, Commelin published his observations, along with the first illustrations of the flowering sweet pea.

It was a Scottish nurseryman, Henry Eckford who raised the sweet pea to new heights, crossbreeding the original plant to create larger blossoms, in beautiful colours.

Modern day breeders have tended to favour more colourful varieties of sweet peas.  If you want to grow more fragrant sweet peas, choose "old fashioned", or "heritage" varieties.

Photographs Copyright of:  Ruth Adams, Widow's Endorphins Photographic Images Incorporated.