How to grow perfect sweet peas

Your comprehensive guide to WINNING AT SPRING (and life in general)

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• Today’s full newsletter is only available to paid subscribers and members of The Wild Garden club.

• It’s a guide to growing sweet peas - my favourite flower with the best fragrance on the planet.

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If you’re not growing sweet peas yet, you should be.

I’m not sure how a little climbing flower from Sicily evolved to smell like a cotton candy dream, but somehow the humble sweet pea has managed it. If a seagull pecked out both your eyes and flew off with them, my advice would be to grow sweet peas and just spend the rest of your life wandering around your garden happily snorting their heavenly scent.

These glorious flowers bloom in almost every colour - mottled pastels, striped reds and purples, salmon pink, pure white with ruffles - set atop long thin stems that make them perfect for picking. Sweet peas epitomise spring, ushering in seasons of cloudless skies and warm weather. They’re relatively easy to grow (provided you get a few basic things right) and will reward your care and diligent watering with weeks of blooms and a garden that smells like a parfumerie.

Clearly I’m a bit obsessed. But the truth is, until a few years ago I really wasn’t that good at growing them. They’d usually did okay in my garden, but only okay and I never got the tumbling onslaught of blooms I’d hoped for. Fortunately, the lovely thing about gardening is that we improve one season at a time, and every year is a new blank slate and a chance to try again. At some point in the last few years, I managed it. And now, looking back, I’m amused to say that I’m actually putting in substantially less effort than I used to. 

In fact, this newsletter is a heavily revised reprint of a blog post I wrote several years ago. I had decided I wanted to finally perfect my sweet pea growing and so I did a deep dive into the internet abyss, determined to learn the secrets of a successful sweet pea. Honestly, I can’t even remember if it worked. I remember there being a lot of tips and rules. You know what I think probably happened? I probably followed all the advice and tried reaaaally hard and my sweet peas were probably, once again, only ok.

Grumble grumble.

Well I’m older and wiser now, and in the last two years my style of gardening has changed rather drastically. Being pregnant and generally buggered meant that 2022 passed in a flash with relatively little gardening to speak of, and I spent most of 2023 learning how to be a parent and definitely not diligently tip pruning sweet peas. 

AND THEY WORKED EVEN BETTER THAN BEFORE.

I think this is how it always is in the garden. There are always a few solid, basic things you really should get right, and then the rest of the advice is total clutter. Probably just there so that the person writing the book/blog/newsletter can meet some arbitrary word count (they don’t seem to realise that if you want to write long-form content you can just blather about motherhood, seagulls and eye injuries). 

I’m happy to say that my recent sweet pea success boils down to just a few key things, and that you CAN - and definitely should - grow sweet peas successfully with minimal effort, ten kids, no time and two bleeding sockets where your eyes used to be (just get one of your ten kids to help you sow them in a straight line). 

Here’s what matters and what you should do.

Buy ‘highly scented’ varieties

First thing’s first, there is just no point in growing sweet peas if they aren’t scented. 

Originally all sweet peas were highly perfumed but now some of the modern varieties are not particularly scented at all. I don’t know who bred these scentless varieties but they are a soulless monster. In my opinion, growing a sweet pea that has no perfume is about as criminal as baking a cake that has no sugar. All show and no substance. I refuse to buy a sweet pea that isn’t scented and I am brutally offended when I bend to sniff one on my travels and come back nasally bereft. 

To ensure you don’t suffer the same olfactory disappointment in your own garden, I strongly recommend checking on each packet before you buy your sweet peas. The scented varieties will almost always say ‘highly fragrant’ or ‘perfumed variety’ if the sweet peas carry that beautiful scent from yesteryear.

Ignore the old saying that ‘you must sow sweet pea seeds before Anzac day’

This advice is nonsense. I get that it’s useful if you need a reminder to sow your sweet peas, but I suspect the unintended consequence is that it leaves a lot of people thinking they’ve missed their chance if they haven’t sown seeds before this (entirely arbitrary) cut off, and so they just don’t bother.

The truth is that sweet peas have a nice long growing season (especially for those of us growing them in mild climates like Perth where there are no winter frosts). If you live in a mild climate in the Southern Hemisphere, you can sow sweet pea seeds anytime in March, April or May.

In fact, if you miss the autumn sowing window, you can even plant sweet pea seeds in spring. Just note that sweet peas planted in spring may not grow quite as large or flower quite as prolifically, and will likely bloom a little later than seeds planted in autumn.

The bonus good news is that because the window for seed sowing is actually way bigger than people assume, you can also sow seeds in batches throughout autumn and spring (this is called ‘succession planting’). Each batch will come into flower at a different time, meaning you can have flowers for a much longer period than if you’d simply planted all your seeds in one go.

(You can also be totally disorganised, forget about sweet peas entirely, suddenly remember them in a blind panic mid-way through April and bung some in in May and you’ll be just fine.)

Ignore advice to ‘scarify’ or soak sweet pea seeds before sowing

Another example of people making things more complicated than they need to be.