Sweet Pea
Spencer Mix
“Grow them from seed, pick them every morning, and your whole house will smell like July. The most generous deal in gardening.”
— ROSIE
Rosie's Take
If summer had an official scent, it would be sweet peas. I'm not even slightly objective about this. The Spencer varieties are the ones you want — those big, ruffled, wavy petals on long stems with a fragrance that can fill an entire room from a single jam jar on the windowsill.
I grow mine up a wigwam of hazel sticks in the back garden and picking them is genuinely the best bit of my summer morning routine. The more you pick, the more they produce, which feels like the most generous deal in gardening. Leave them and they go to seed. Keep picking and they keep going until the first frost.
The Spencer mix gives you this beautiful jumble of colours — from pale, almost-white lavender through coral, deep magenta, and that particular shade of dusky pink that looks like the inside of a seashell. I never arrange them by colour. The whole point is the joyful mess of it.
They don't last long in a vase — three or four days at best. But in those three days, you'll walk into the room and stop. The scent hits you before you even see them. It's sweet but not cloying, with something green underneath, like warm honey mixed with fresh-cut grass on a June evening.
They're incredibly easy to grow from seed, which makes them one of my favourite recommendations for anyone who says they can't grow anything. You can. Start with sweet peas.
Where to Buy
If you want to try sweet pea for yourself, here's where I'd point you:
“Clare Florist sometimes have sweet pea bunches in high summer — I always grab them when they appear because the season's short.”
Order This Flower →“Bloom & Wild include sweet peas in their summer letterbox bunches and honestly, opening the box and getting that hit of scent is one of the loveliest postal experiences going.”
Order This Flower →✿ From the folklore cabinet
Sweet peas are the flower of departure in the Victorian language of flowers — you gave them to say goodbye, or thank you for a lovely time. I've always thought that was rather perfect. They're summer's farewell in a flower.
