SWEET PEAS.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXIX, Issue 8234, 11 September 1906, Page 7

SWEET PEAS.

The popular garden flower of the day is the sweet pea. The reason why it has a greater number of fanciers than any other flower is because it can be grown as easily by the cottage gardener as by the most skilled professional, and with equal success, while it is adaptable to almost every clime where popular gardening is practised. Its value is not limited to garden decoration alone, but it is eqaally valued for house decoration. Other advantages possessed by the sweet pea are its wide range of colours, varying through all shades, from the purest white to the very deepest purple. Also, it continues by sucoessional sowings and under right conditions, to bloom for eight or nine months in the year. Quite a number of local enthusiasts are locking forward to a display this season, and have, in some oases, sown up to as many as sixty varieties in one garden. Others are limiting themselves to about a dozen of those whloh are considered the leading kinds in Europe and America. Among these are the following:— Agnes Johnston, a deep pink shaded cream. Chancellor, bright orange, wings shaded rosy orange. Dorothy Eckford. pure white, very large. Dorothy Tennent, rosy mauve. Ooooinea, rich soft cherry red. Firefly, brilliant globing crimson. Hon. P, Bouverie, coral pink. Hon, Mrs, E. Kenyon, deep primrose. King Edward VII., bright crimson, very fine. Lady Gri?el Hamilton, pale lavender. Lady Mary Currie, orange pink, shaded lilac. Misa Willmott, rioh deep orange pink. Navy Blue, true blue. Prima Donna, lovely soft pink. Primrose, pale yellow, f Princess May, light lavender. Sadie burpe, pearl white, very flue. Stanley, deep maroon. Latest accounts from the Old Country still report progress In the development of the Sweet Pea. The leading hybridisers are placing some novelties of great merit on the market. These no doubt will be seen locally at an early date. That the Sweet Pen will remain a popular flower there iB not the slightest fear, and this is well explained by the Rev. T. Hutchins of America, in his paper at the Sweet Pea Conference in England in 1900. In dealing with the subject and with the history of this popular flower, he showed that it was introduced into Italy by a monk named Father Cupani, an ardent botanist, and then developed by the hybridißers into the Sweet Pea of to-da'y. He stated that by right of discovery Italy wight lay claim in the nanre of Cupani to this flower, but by the right to which America justly and graoiously bows. Great Britain is now the motherland of the sweet pea. After referring to the labours of the late Henry Eoksford and othe;a in developingthis flower, in conolusion he said: "The Sweet Pea has a keel that was meant to seek all shores; it has wings that are meant to fly across all con tinents; it has a standard whioh is friendly to all nations, and has a fragranoe like the. universal Gospel, yea, a sweet, prophecy of welcome everywhere that it has abundantly fufllled."