Sandy's Garden ... Hang on in there sweetie

Several years ago, perusing the items temptingly displayed in a local garden centre, Ailsa remembered the ever-lasting sweet peas which grew in the garden of the house where she grew up in Fife.
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They were an attractive addition to any garden, she asserted, undemanding, frost-resistant, problem-free – in short, just what we were looking for to grow in the space beside the bay bush.

Well, I was unaware that we were actually looking for something to grow in the space beside the bay bush/tree – I’ve always thought of bay trees, but ours has several shoots sprouting up at ground level, which makes me want to call it a shrub or a bush, for trees have just a single stem or trunk springing out of the ground in my simple book.

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Whatever; if Ailsa wanted to fill the space beside the bay with everlasting sweet peas, who was I to argue.

Falkirk Herald gardening guru Sandy SimpsonFalkirk Herald gardening guru Sandy Simpson
Falkirk Herald gardening guru Sandy Simpson

And in that manner everlasting sweet peas were introduced into our garden. Perhaps I should make clear before I go any further that ‘everlasting’ in this context doesn’t mean ‘artificial.’

There are several houses not a million miles from ours where plastic plants can be seen, usually in pots or hanging baskets; and, while some of them look quite convincing when they are new and the plants they are modelled on are in season, fading, discolouring summer-flowering plants ‘blooming’ in mid-January are distinctly unconvincing.

No, everlasting in the context of ‘everlasting sweet peas’ is synonymous with perennial, meaning that, with any luck, the roots will survive a number of winters to throw new shoots come late spring or early summer and produce fresh flourishes of flowers in high summer.

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Lathyrus latifolius, to give it its proper botanical name … otherwise known as the perennial peavine, perennial pea, broad-leaved everlasting-pea or just everlasting pea … is, to quote the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), “a vigorous climbing herbaceous perennial to 2m, with winged stems and paired grey-green leaflets bearing tendrils.

Flowers 2-3cm in width, vivid purplish-pink, in racemes of 5-11.” And a raceme is defined as, “a flower cluster with the separate flowers attached by short equal stalks at equal distances along a central stem.

The flowers at the base of the central stem develop first.” Lathyrus is the classical Greek word for ‘pea’ and latifolius means ‘broad-leaved’ in Latin, so Carl von Linné, the 18th century Swedish botanist, physician and zoologist who created the system in which every kind of animal and plant is given a name consisting of two Latin words, one for its genus and the other for its species, didn’t have to spend too much time deciding on this name.

It’s a plant which likes to climb, using its tendrils to grip anything within reach, although it will scramble along banks and slopes if it can’t find anything to clamber up. Its longest stems will reach a height (or length) of more than two metres – the top of the tallest stem of ours is now 2.4m … say, 8 feet in old money … above the ground.

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We give ours a frame to help them; and they use their neighbour, the bay tree, as a support as well. They are coming into flower now, with lots of pinky-purple buds ready to open. The foliage will die back in the autumn when we will remove everything above ground; and the plants will lie dormant until next year, growing very quickly once they decide that conditions are right.

The everlasting sweet pea is a vine – a plant that grows up or over things; and, given the rate at which it grows, it’s easy to understand why Jack’s magic beans were credited with springing up overnight in the children’s story about a certain beanstalk – another vine.

However, although they are cousins of green peas, don’t eat the small, green, podded seeds which will succeed the flowers on the everlasting pea; they’ll give you acute indigestion!

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