Eight of the very best varieties on offer
‘Cupani’
A pretty, yet robust plant; its attractive flowers produce a powerfully sweet and heady fragrance. ‘Cupani’ produces two maroon and purple, bi-coloured flowers on each of its stems. The flowers are smaller and the stems shorter than the cultivated sweet peas we know and love, yet this original sweet pea is more highly perfumed and has a certain charm that makes it a firm favourite with so many of us today, more than 300 years after its introduction.
‘Anniversary’
One of the longest-flowering sweet peas you’ll find, blooming from late spring through until early autumn. The tips of its ivory-coloured petals are infused with a simply divine, rose-pink ripple. This combination of ivory and rose results in the prettiest and most delicate of pink blooms – it’s sublime! ‘Anniversary’ produces longstemmed blooms, which make very pretty, delightfully scented, frilly cut flowers. This is a great choice to grow if you’re looking to exhibit at your local flower show.
‘Aphrodite’
White-flowered sweet peas are so beautiful, but they aren’t always as floriferous as we’d hope. ‘Aphrodite’ is one of the exceptions, being a very strong and vigorous sweet pea. It produces a great many pure white flowers on very long stems, flowering from late May until early autumn. This exceptional variety can produce up to 15 flowers on each stem and has a light to medium strength fragrance.
‘Naomi Nazareth’
A reliable sweet pea, which produces lots of pretty, pale blue, long-stemmed, large flowers from mid-May until early autumn. A good choice to grow whether you’re looking to exhibit your blooms, use them as cut flowers, or just want to add to the beauty of your garden. ‘Naomi Nazareth’ has a ‘vintage’ colouring
and a sweet, musky fragrance.
‘Turquoise Lagoon’
Lathyrus hammettii ‘Turquoise Lagoon’ is a new and exciting sweet pea. It produces pretty pink flowers, which change colour as they age, from a lilac-pink to a turquoise-blue flower. The two colours are present on the plants at the same time, which gives a very attractive effect. The flowers are sweetly scented and look so different and unusual, having an almost metallic or iridescent appearance. Somewhat smaller than many sweet peas, this new variety grows to about 1.5-1.7m (5-5.5ft) and flowers from mid-May until August.
‘Betty Maiden’
An early-flowering variety, it usually appears a week or two before many other sweet peas, in early May. There are so many reasons to grow it; it’s such a great plant! ‘Betty Maiden’ produces exquisitely scented, ivory-coloured flowers, with a mauve-blue picotee edge and matching petal markings, which intensify in colour as the blooms age. ‘Betty Maiden’ produces lovely flowers with a gorgeous fragrance.
‘King Edward VII’
An heirloom sweet pea, bred by Henry Eckford, and introduced back in 1903. Being an old-fashioned variety, it has smaller flowers and shorter stems than the modern sweet peas, but it boasts a delightfully sweet and powerful perfume, and a charm that can’t be beaten. ‘King Edward VII’ produces crimsonred flowers, which are bright and cheerfully coloured, but never brash.
‘Windsor’
The dark flowers of ‘Windsor’ bring a dramatic intensity to the garden. It’s a reliable, floriferous sweet pea that produces large, deep chocolate-marooncoloured flowers on long stems, making it an excellent variety to use for showing or cut flowers. In the garden, its wavy blooms combine well with white or cream flowers. For maximum effect, ‘Windsor’ looks good when grown together as a large group covering a wigwam.