We're Sweet Peas...

As I labeled seed packet files the other day, the fact I seem to easily collect more sweet pea packets than any other flower made an impression on me.

I don't know much about them except a vague memory of hearing that their sweet perfume was being bred out in a trade for more flamboyant looks...but that some breeders were fighting back.



However, a dip into Google Books supplied an avalanche of books dedicated to the sweet pea published in the latter half of the 19th century!


Up through the 1850s sweet peas were valued as a garden flower as they are wonderful in bouquets. But they were simply referred to by the the common color names, purple, black, scarlet, white, pink, pink and white.





Liberty Hyde Bailey wrote in his 1896 book, Sweet Peas -

The sweet pea has had but one genius. He is Henry Eckford, who for twenty years has given his attention to this plant upon his garden-farm at Wem, in Shropshire, England. He has given us the greater number of our best improved varieties. '' When I first took up the sweet pea,'' he writes, '' there were six or eight distinct varieties in cultivation, and experts in the art, as far as I could learn, had come to the conclusion that it could not be further improved, and in the first two or three generations of the work it appeared a fair conclusion; but I should say that I had been for many years working on the improvement of various florist flowers, and which had proved so eminently successful that a first rebuff did not deter me from further attempts." 

In our own country, the work has now been taken up by Rev. W. T. Hutchins, of Indian Orchard, Massachusetts; and it has remained for him to make the first important attempt to write any account of the modern sweet pea. His booklet, " All About Sweet Peas," appeared in 1894; and he has been and is still the most devoted grower and champion of sweet peas upon this side of the Atlantic. This is not saying that he is the largest grower, for this honor is held by C. C. Morse & Co., of California, whose crop of sweet peas covered 250 acres in 1895, and this firm has also produced a number of excellent varieties.    But Mr. Hutchins is an amateur sweet pea critic, whilst Mr. Morse grows the seeds for market. W. Atlee Burpee & Co., of Philadelphia, were amongst the first retail seedsmen to take up the sweet pea. The first sweet pea show of any note in this country was held under the inspiration of Mr. Hutchins at Springfield, Mass., in 1893. 

Bailey could be clearer in his attribution - most all the improved selections of the late 1800s were Eckford's!  In the 1890s breeders in this country were enthusiastically involved, however.  

This all leads to some interesting stories of breeders and the also of the California seed companies.

Sweet pea links:

• 1896 - Sweet Peas, Liberty Hyde Bailey and Alanson Phelps Wyman

• 1910 - The Book of the Sweet Pea
• 1900  - Sweet Peas and how to Grow Them