A sweet-pea Summer

Sweet peas are enjoying an Instagram moment’ but to appreciate fully these charming flowers one must hasten back to the real world, says Ursula Buchan

- Ursula Buchan

IN YEARS when I fancy exhibiting flowers in a local show, I grow sweet peas on the so-called ‘cordon system’. This involves training single plants up 2.4m bamboo canes, tying the stems in frequently, and punctiliously trimming off tendrils and side-shoots, thus thwarting the natural scrambling habit of Lathyrus odoratus. All the plant’s energy goes into flowering, so this is the surest way to achieve really long, straight stems and four, well-presented flowers on each stem. If done on summer evenings, it is wonderfully relaxing work.

But it is also time-consuming, having been developed at a time when gardening labour was cheap and plentiful. These days, in public and private gardens alike, plastic or high-tensile steel netting, or tripods, have replaced canes as the usual means of supporting sweet-pea plants. The stems may not grow quite so long, the flowers not quite so evenly spaced, but as a method it still works extremely well. Sheep netting is the preferred material used at Easton Walled Gardens in Lincolnshire which, over the past 25 years, has developed an enviable reputation for the quality and range of the sweet peas grown there.