Do you have a favorite flower? Sweet peas might be my new favorite flower! Don't judge me if I keep adding colors and varieties to my sweet pea garden-because I'm hooked!
Last year my favorite flower was campanula -aka the bellflower.
They grow tall with spikes of pretty pastel bells that are so unique.
This year I am definitely growing bellflowers again-
so, you will find them mixed with sweet peas and
other early summer blooms in your June bouquets.
There are two types of sweet peas- the perennial and the annual. Usually, the perennial peas are not as fragrant-but they do come back each year.
I have a few perennial sweet pea plants in the garden beds of my front porch that grow up the rails each year. They are not as fragrant as the annual ones, but I do love their color. They bloom all summer long until frost-especially if they are deadheaded. The bees and hummingbirds love them.
They are also called everlasting peas.
Ornamental sweet peas are in the family of Fabaceae -otherwise known as Lathyrus odoratus and are native to the Mediterranean area.
These colorful and fragrant plants and seed pods are not edible, as they are toxic to humans and pets.
They like to grow in the cool weather and climb up a trellis. Their little tendrils reach out and grab hold of anything to attach and cling to. Then they will send out their stems with a few blossoms on each stem. They will keep cranking out more stems as they climb, but once the summer heat turns on, they will all start going to seed pods and quit blooming.
This is the perfect time to start saving the seeds for next year. Last summer I saved seeds from a mix of colors that I had planted.
From that mix, this one particular orange color stood out from the
pastel pinks and purples, and I knew I wanted more of those for the next growing season.
I put a twisty tie on this orange sweet pea plant to mark it and around mid-summer watched carefully for the plant to go to seed.
Then I collected the brown seed pods and placed them in a jar until spring.
In January, I started the saved seeds and waited patiently for them to germinate.
Once sweet peas germinate in their tray, the best trick is to get them outside in the sun. I kept them in our unheated hoophouse and daily made sure that they didn't dry out. You can also set them out on your patio table or a protected place.
I can't leave mine outside in the open because my free-range chickens will find them.
By March these sweet pea babies were ready to be transplanted into our hoophouse soil.
The orange sweet peas were the first in the ground. I can't wait to see how they turn out. I looked all through my photos from last year, but I couldn't even find a picture of the orange sweet peas. I only had two plants out of the mix. We will just all have to wait for them to bloom this spring.
I seemed to have a plethora of pinks, purples and whites though.
Many people that I talk to about sweet peas say that their grandparents grew them in their gardens-along with carnations. If you have memories of your parents or grandparents growing them, please share in the comments below.
Just last week I had someone tell me that the only reason she grows them each year is for her husband- because it reminds him of his mother.
I couldn't find many public domain pictures of famous artists and their paintings of sweet peas during the Renaissance period. I did find this one painting by French painter Henry Fantin-Latour (1836-1904) and I can't get over how real looking it is. He was an expert of painting flowers during his career.
In this following painting of his, I keep noticing the white and pink sweet pea in the front! I wonder if that variety is still around because I would love to grow it.
I also found a British artist named Beatrice Parsons who lived 1870-1955.
She was an expert also of painting flowers and aristocratic gardens of England during the early 1900's.
She illustrated this watercolor of sweet peas for a 1910 book called "Beautiful Flowers and How to Grow Them".
Just look at this jungle of sweet peas and how tall they are!
I can almost smell them! Can you?
Follow along on Instagram this spring/summer as my sweet peas bloom. https://www.instagram.com/free_range_blooms/
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