I love everything about sweet peas – especially their wonderful aroma.
Iabsolutely love sweet peas! Their heady scent permeates our house and garden from June to September – sometimes longer, depending on the weather – and an increasingly wonderful array of beautiful colours delights our eye each year. They are one of the quintessential English cottage garden blooms; for some “the queen of annuals”.
But, oh… Lathyrus odoratus hail from the Mediterranean, betwixt smouldering Sicily and cultured Crete! And they only became such an icon of Englishness after they were cultivated by a certain Henry Eckford in the 1870s. Thank you so much, Henry.
It does seems fitting that sweet peas come from Crete. Perhaps Apollo, Artemis and Zeus delighted at their captivating fragrance. It seems right that they should. I must say, even though I was born in England, have Irish ancestors and red hair, I am a sun-lover and loved Greece when I travelled around the mainland and islands in 1990. I can just see Pascal, Loulou the Jack Russellosaurus (she adores the sun, too) and I, sitting on a wonderful terrace together near Thessaloniki in a shady spot, surrounded by lovely, fragrant blooms, eating fresh honey and peaches. When one visits that region, it’s not hard to believe it was the birthplace of the gods.
Sweet peas flower in abundance once they start and, the more you cut them, the more flowers they will give you. Of course, the stems will get shorter as the season goes on. This vase is probably the last of the long-ish stemmed ones I will gather. The act of selecting and arranging the colours is as much a joy for me as looking at them and smelling them on my desk or table. As is the fact that they were grown totally organically – like everything else in our garden – as part of a natural ecosystem where birds and insects are all free to enjoy and share its beauty and abundance.