A WOMAN WHO INVENTS SWEET PEAS.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLV, Issue 17, 26 April 1911, Page 41

A WOMAN WHO INVENTS SWEET PEAS.

BOW NEW VARIETIES ARK EVOLVED.

(By

W. Beach Thomas.)

wonderful sweet pea gaiueu u. — flourishes under the control of a lady at Holdfast Hall, In Worcestershire. It has produced tome of the most gorgeous of the new irace of sweet peas and has a number of quite peculiar attractions. Miss Hemus, who with her sister, set tip and manages this great garden, believes that she and otner growers are on the edge of discoveries which will produce flowers of vastly greater variety and Splendour than we have at' present; and as a worker on purely scientific lines her belief is an earnest of greater things which should delight the innumerable Votaries of this flower of the year. i WHY SHE ST ARTED. “I started,” Miss Hemus said, “in consequence of interest in the Mendelian |heory aroused by the research work being carried on at the Agricultural School, Cambridge University, by Professor Biffen and others. “I realised eight years ago the impiense future which the application of this theory might open to the sweet pea, a flower in which I had always been greatly interested. Not having the means to pursue this work as a hobby on the large scale upon which it was inevitable it should be done to confirm results, I was led to take it up commercially. “So far as the public are concerned, I have been astonished at the enthusiasm for sweet peas which has been aroused lately among all classes. This is particularly noticeable in the poorer half of the community. “I feel sure that the sweet pea is destined to hide many more of the garden (walls and ugly outlooks of our towns. Among great enthusiasts at present are the working men of Birmingham and Yorkshire, the former clearly proving that the sweet pea will thrive under trying urban conditions. I have now eleven acres under cultivation. Four thousand of my finest stocks were sown in the open ground last September. Most of them are looking well, although they are smaller than usual. “Every season I destroy miles of sweet peas, not ‘because they have not given magnificent blooms, but because the Stocks are not true, or because perhaps one stock of a hundred or so separate plant cultures has proved a slightly cleaner colour or a trifle better in form. There is no room for anything but the best. i SECRET OF SUCCESS. “Another reason of my success is the immense scale upon which I work for the production of new and more beautiful colours and types. Every inch of my ground is given up to my own varieties and new types which are either in their first, second, third or fourth generation from the cross. “I rarely grow a stock after the fifth generation, as by this time it is usually found that the stock is in some way beginning to show signs of deterioration (generally by reversion to the grandiflora type) and it is safer to replace it by one with the increased vigour of the hybrid. “It is, of teourse, necessary sometimes to wait for results, and three to five years are necessary for the raising and fixing of a new variety. “My aims for the future are all in the direction of clearer, cleaner and more brilliant colours. Form is an attribute one can never lose sight.of; and size of bloom is also important, ,but I place colour before anything else. '‘The possibilities of the sweet pea are at present undreamed of—l have a charming race of bush peas which grow fifteen inches high' and form charming plants covered- in flowers almost if not quite as large as thbse on ordinary plants.”—“Daily Mail.”