Sweetpeas : Cottage Gardens and English English
As I get older, the years seem to pass more quickly and the beautiful, yet inexorable dance of the seasons continues unabated. As humans we tend to see ourselves as the centre of our own personal universes, no matter how good or bad our self-esteem happens to be.
The changing of said seasons and the simple truth that we can do little to alter the ongoing march of time’s passing or its effects on us, reminds me how much this viewpoint is a fantasy. That, when we see the world as merely a backdrop to our story we are, in some small way, lying to ourselves.
Winter, I would argue, with its inevitable return, reminds us of our own mortality, that we are not really the “masters of our own ships” but are more like a lone autumnal leaf tossed on a cold November wind.
I find it comforting, in an odd sort of way, to know that the natural world has been doing its thing for eons before I was born and could continue for thousands of years after I am gone. We are here for just a short space of time, a blip on the cosmic time-line, a breath on the winds of eternity. Questions of mortality and our own impact on the world cause my mind to wander to those who have gone before us, to thoughts of tradition and memory. These thoughts inevitably bring my mind to dwell on thoughts of the garden, of the natural cycle of things and eventually to the sweetpea.
Earlier this year, if you remember, I started a new blog to write about my garden, how it makes me feel, my mistakes and my occasional successes. I waxed lyrical about why British gardens feel different to American ones and why I felt the need to comment on the issue.
I truly intended to stay committed to my blogging on the subject, as dedicated as any of that peculiarly British breed of writer, the garden journalist. Alas, I failed, I faltered, the work of the gardening year (and the inconvenient truth that unlike said garden journos I have a full-time job when I’m not messing around in the dirt) distracted me from this noble aim.
Dear reader, not only did I not write about the garden when I should have, but I also posted pictures of my roses on social media in December, five months after I took them. Not in June when it would have been most fitting. Maybe it's a trait of gardeners and writers the world over to be overwhelmed by the grandness of our visions. Still, when I did sit down to try to find some time to write, it was the sweetpea with all its tradition and vibrancy that constantly wrestled its way, to the forefront of my mind.
Can there be anything as truly British, in horticultural terms at least, as the image of the humble sweetpea snaking its way over a scrap of white washed trellis. There it lies, laden with delicate, yet deep coloured flowers ephemeral, yet strangely substantial at the same time. The spirit of the English Cottage Garden, the backdrop to many an Agatha Christie penned whodunnit embodied in rambling filigree plant form.
Despite having never grown sweetpeas before, I was seduced by the allure of tradition and ignoring the tendency of some on-line commentators to suggest that sweetpeas are hard to grow and therefore not worth the effort, I decided to try my hand at growing the flowers from seed. It should be noted, that at this point, I had never really grown any flowers from seed at all.
Sweetpeas, I discovered after much awkward research, can be started from seed indoors, even in the depths of a Mid-Western winter and grow perfect well until such time as the weather warms up enough to plant them outside. In fact, some gardeners suggest starting the seeds under cover as early as the previous October or November in order to get a strong vigorous plant come springtime.
I did not start my plants in November, early planning never having been my strong suit, but on a cold day in February. The Mid-Western landscape was still under a reliably subzero blanket of white snow and there was I planting one of the springtime stars of the English Country Garden.
Not that it was tremendously hard to plant them. The seeds of the plant are quite large and therefore are easy to manipulate without dropping them all over the floor. It is not difficult to get them growing, just placing them in pots of seed starting mix and following the instructions on the seed packet is the basis of it. That and then putting them somewhere warm to germinate.
There is a traditional process among some growers of soaking the seeds overnight and scoring them with a knife to encourage the germination process, but there are also just as many plantsmen and women who seem to dismiss this as an old-wives tale and sow without such encouragements. I didn’t soak them, or score them, for that matter and they seemed to grow well enough for me.
They do have deeper roots than many annual flowers, at least initially, and so many gardeners choose to start them in special deep seed starting pots called “Roottrainers” or in deeper pots more generally used when potting up other annuals. This is done to allow these deeper roots to develop with little need for disturbance until they are transplanted out into the garden.
It has definitely been a learning experience, growing sweetpeas, but an enriching one. From watching the small seedlings germinate, develop their “seed leaves”, then their “true leaves” which resemble the final plant and finally the beginnings of their twisting vine-like growth, it has all been immensely rewarding. They grow upright quite quickly, reaching for light, but this can lead to tall thin plants with not many flowers.
The remedy, it turns out, to this particular horticultural conundrum is to pinch out the tips of the stems above a pair of leaves when they reach the height of about 4 inches or 10 centimetres. This encourages the plant to grow side shoots and become a much bushier plant which will lead to more flowers in the long run when they are finally transplanted out into the soil of the garden.
This being my first time engaging with the growth of this enigmatic example of botany, I attempted to be alert and responsive to every little move they made. Shifting the pots to different spots in the house to maximise light became a daily task, along with making sure their seed mix didn’t dry out. I don’t, as yet have a greenhouse, but the plants can grow quite tall and bushy in these small pots even inside the house, as they are an annual climber and more tolerant of cooler temperatures than some of the more tender annuals.
Spring proper comes late in the Mid-west, the soil not really warming up enough for transplanting purposes until least the beginning of May but I was able to start hardening off the plants by the last couple of weeks of April.
In retrospect, I could have started this process somewhat earlier for, while sweetpeas are no great lovers of the cold, they seem to tolerate cooler temperatures adequately. That timing will definitely be something that I intend to experiment with and improve upon in the coming year.
After reading articles, watching perennial gardener’s favourite “BBC Gardeners’ World” and scouring the inter-net for relevant information, I discovered something of a consensus in opinion on the planting of sweetpeas. They like to be planted in a place where their roots can be somewhat shaded and their flowers get some sunlight, with some drainage added for heavier soils and some organic material added for well-draining soils. I added some vermiculite to help with drainage and some composted manure.
This year I grew two varieties, “Queen of the Night” and “Sweet Dreams”, which I split equally between a wigwam made of garden canes in the back garden and a pair of mini trellises in the front. I made sure to water them deeply every few days and mulched around them, and they responded well.
They responded a little too well, it has to be said, and I soon discovered that my short and simple cane wigwam was a little too short and simple. I had underestimated, not just the height of sweetpeas but my ability to grow them to that height. The wigwam was woefully inadequate to its task and soon disappeared under a delicately intricate, yet impenetrable network of trailing stems, leaves and intense purple flowers with a beautiful scent. Although I wasn’t quite sure how I had expected the process to go, I was ecstatic, I had succeeded in growing sweetpeas!
They truly added something to the garden, specifically around the rear of our patio beds, bringing something of the feeling of a hidden English Cottage Garden to suburban Madison, Wisconsin.
I picked the flowers within a couple of days of their appearance, partially because they look nice in a vase in the house and also to prevent them going to seed. They rewarded my attention with reliable flowers from the end of May till the middle of September. I even discovered one errant bloom surviving on a stem as I cut back the dying sweetpeas in the middle of October!
The spent plants went on to my newly begun compost heap and thus became the first plants that I have grown and nurtured all the way through their lifecycles until they became compost and returned their nutrients back into the soil.
The cycle of seasons and the passing years yet again echoing through my mind as I placed the faded stems into the compost bin, and I realised once more why this garden means so much to me. The words of Rupert Brooke written on the verge of World War I in his sadly prescient poem “The Soldier” came unbidden to my thoughts.
“And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams as happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.”
I try to plant native American plants as much as I plant traditional English country garden favourites and my wife is an American, but when I think of gardens they will always lie “under an English heaven”. They are a memory of that now far-off land that bore me; a nation of epically landscaped country gardens and honestly hardworking city allotments, prettily planted window boxes and neatly mown postage stamp sized front lawns.
They remind me of home, all those lazy childhood weekend afternoons in the height of summer, that seem to never end but merely slowly pass in a warm flower-scented haze. The coming of autumn and walking through the freshly fallen leaves crispy cracking on my way home from school.
The damp cold of winter sending all the land into a rain-soaked slumber punctuated by occasional snow. The spring that wakes the earth again slower than it does here, gradually calling greenery once more unto life.
Sweetpeas speak to me of England, the whole United Kingdom and when I think of them, when I see them growing through the seasons, even in the subzero embrace of a Wisconsin winter, I am a child once more and home.
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