Gillian Vine looks at a royal favourite.
Sweet peas were favourites of the Queen, so it was fitting the informal floral arrangement on her casket included some blooms from Balmoral and Windsor.
Her Majesty’s birthday was April 21, so the sweet pea was her birthday flower. Here, it’s probably a more appropriate flower to celebrate a January birthday or other occasion and there’s still time to grow your own if you sow seed now or buy ready-to-go plants.
There are about 160 sweet pea (Lathyrus) species, although most of what we grow are L. odoratus cultivars. First came Cupani, introduced into England from Sicily in 1699. A similar-looking bicolour, Matucana, is an early 20th century variety, but it usually has four flowers to a stem (Cupani has two) and grows taller.
Another notable early introduction was deep pink-and-white Painted Lady (1737). Sweet peas really took off in the middle of the 19th century, probably because new English varieties introduced between 1860 and 1870 by the likes of Henry Eckford offered more options to growers. Known as the grandifloras, the new flowers were bigger — smaller, though, than modern sweet peas — hence the upsurge in the plant’s popularity.
Sweet peas were being widely grown in New Zealand by the 1860s and in 1918 a Mr Bradbury, from Runanga on the West Coast, claimed to be growing 1000 varieties. Closer to home, Evening Star staff member G.J. Errington was a keen exhibitor at Dunedin shows. He must have grown numerous sweet peas, as a class he entered at a 1912 Dunedin Horticultural Society show required 12 vases of different varieties and each vase had to have 12 flower stems. He was probably the same George Errington who wrote a chapter on sweet peas for The Star Garden Book 1921 edition.
These days, there are only a handful of individual varieties are listed in catalogues, including non-scented L. latifolius with magenta, pink or white flowers, which I think of as a bit of a weed. However, in England, sweet-pea specialist Roger Parsons holds the national collection of 1300 varieties in his Sussex nursery.
In recent years, Dr Keith Hammett, of Auckland, has bred a number of fine sweet peas, most of them with excellent perfume. His Erewhon is a reverse bicolour, having darker wings (lower petals) than standards. A cross between two species, it has been a hit worldwide.
Easy to grow, sweet peas like a sunny spot and well-drained, rich soil that does not dry out, with steady watering during the growing season to get good flowers over a longer period. Sheep pellets or well-rotted manure worked into the ground before planting are excellent food for them.
Because sweet peas are wind-pollinated, you do not have to worry about cross-pollination, so saving seed will give the same varieties, although the occasional "rogue" may appear.
They come in almost every colour. Pure yellow is yet to come but Dr Hammett is working on this, using fragrant annual L. belinensis, discovered in Turkey in 1987, and other species.
Such a bloom would be a treasure, so perhaps he could name it Queen Elizabeth, after the most treasured monarch in British history.
