Fall planting for a fragrant spring
Nothing makes scents like sweet peas.
These climbing, vining legumes aren’t edible — they’re grown for their flowers, and when I say flowers, think armfuls of colorful, ambrosial bouquets, brightening musty rooms with their indelible, unmatchable scent.
“Sweet peas are everything a flower should be,” said Renee Shepherd, founder of Renee’s Garden seed company in Felton, Calif., near Santa Cruz. “They’re deliciously fragrant, with beautiful colors, and they also attract pollinators, so they’re really worth growing.”
It’s the fragrance, though, that really makes sweet peas a standout. The smell is hard to describe, but once sniffed it’s unforgettable.
“It’s a delicate sweetness,” says Steve Hampson, horticulturist and sweet pea specialist at Roger’s Gardens in Corona Del Mar.
“It smells like orange blossom with a hint of honey,” Shepherd said. “Perfumers have never been able to hit the right notes. And the scent is never cloying or overwhelming.”
You can make this lovely English garden-type scene a reality in your yard, but you need to act now because fall is prime time for planting this cool-weather flower in Southern California.
Sweet peas have gotten a bad rep as hard to grow because most people try to plant them at the wrong time, such as spring or early summer, Shepherd and Hampson said. These are slow-growing plants that need SoCal’s cool, mild winters to develop the strong root system they’ll use to survive warmer temperatures and produce towering (up to 8 feet tall) spring blooms.
These climbing plants mostly loll around during the winter months, growing just 4 to 6 inches tall, Shepherd said, but when the days start getting longer in March, the plants take off, exploding with growth and blooms for four to six weeks. And the more you cut, the more blooms you’ll get.
Your biggest challenge, Shepherd and Hampson say, will be choosing from the many colors and varieties. Both agree the dainty violet and white “April in Paris” variety is the most fragrant, but the sky’s the limit when it comes to color and styles. (Interesting side note: The frilly Spencer varieties were developed in the English gardens of Princess Diana’s Spencer family.)
Hampson grows multiple varieties at home in Tustin. Roger’s Gardens started selling sweet pea seedlings five years ago, and the program has been so successful that 27 varieties are now offered, primarily from seed developed by New Zealand plant breeder Keith Hammett. Renee’s Garden sells a wide variety of heirloom and newer varieties of sweet pea seeds, which are available online at reneesgarden.com or at many retail locations, including Roger’s Gardens.