A gardener’s dreams begin with a catalog

Oh, they’ve done it again. Those seed companies have me nearly drooling over their slick glossies. Reveling in the possibilities, drinking down the photos as though they were a tall, cool glass of lemonade on a hot August day.

Every year this thing happens to me. For no good reason a group of plants – a color scheme, perhaps, or a family of plants, maybe – will appeal to me. They’ll overtake my urge for diversity in the garden and will demand to be planted. A sea of snapdragons. A mass of moonflowers. A plethora of poppies.

Last year, anything blue appealed to me. Nolana, veronica, salvia, verbena, lobelia, heliotrope. I couldn’t have enough. Everywhere I looked, vivid photos jumped off the seed catalog page. “You want me! You need me!” the blue flowers screamed, their petals seeming to flutter off the one-dimensional page.

The year before that, it was foxgloves. Common, Grecian, straw, chocolate, rusty and yellow foxglove, I planted them all. In outrageous abundance.

Three years ago, it was nasturtiums beckoning me from the lifeless sheets of glossy paper. ‘Empress of India’ lured me with her ruby, jeweled blossoms. ‘Whirlybird’ teased me with its silly, exceedingly cheery, vibrant flowers. ‘Alaska’ tempted me with its variegated, white speckled, reminiscent-of-icebergs, but deceptively peppery leaves.

And so, you get the point. I trace back my gardening indulgences and remember them fondly.

This year, I dream of sweet peas. A bed overflowing with shocking color from one end of the spectrum to the other. Flourishing under the summer sun, I imagine the darling tendrils wrapping gently around trellis stings. I smell their sweet aroma riding on the summer breeze. I feel their colorful blooms and bright green leaves brushing against my sides as I walk past. And I want them!

Who wouldn’t want a sweet pea, really? Beautiful in the garden, fragrant and colorful in the bouquet. Members of the genus Lathyrus, which encompasses more than 150 species of flowering annuals and herbaceous and evergreen perennials, sweet peas offer a range of color and form. Mounded, climbing, vining – they grow well in sandy or pebbly rock gardens, in rich woodland gardens or in the herbaceous border. Many of the sweet peas offered in seed catalogs are annuals that grow well direct-sown as soon as the soil is workable in the cool temperatures of spring.

So onward to an extravagant planting of sweet peas, I say, as the purple (nearly black), peach-and-cream and violet blooms leap off the page toward my winter-weary eyes. Worry later about the mechanics of building a 30-foot-long trellis; worry now about getting the maximum number of seeds before those savvy seed companies sell out!

Annual sweet peas yield the dividends of our efforts all season long, but of course perennial varieties come back year after year and flower only over their designated period without our help.

The one perennial sweet pea variety I have growing in the garden has never proven to be too fussy. In fact, it’s endured rather, shall we say, dramatic treatment in the past. Last spring, in a fit of needing symmetry along the front of our pergola, I decided to divide my pink-flowering specimen in early spring. I was chatting away with a visitor while working and before I knew it I’d divided the poor pea into four somewhat pathetic plants.

Replanted, the poor victims of my inattentiveness floundered for several weeks. I watered them every few days after transplanting them, but when spring work overtook me, they slipped to the back of my mind. Sometime around the middle of July I remembered them. I looked along the posts of the pergola and lo and behold! They were thriving. Well, I say that in a comparative sense – considering their humble beginning. They were thriving beyond my expectations, for certain. Small masses of green leaves mounded at the site of each transplant. Some even grasped for the stings of their trellis and produced buds that held the promise of light pink blooms soon to come.

Sweet peas are my kind of plant. I daresay that’s why they keep screaming to me from the pages of seed catalogs. In these months of winter, I think myself the tender cultivator of each precious plant in the garden. In summer, my attention is divided among the hundreds of plants growing there. Unlike the sweet peas divided, that kind of attention causes some to flourish and others, sadly, to vanquish.

But give it a go, I say! Bring on those sweet peas, with their decisively hardy willingness to survive, regardless of the gardener’s attention (or lack thereof.) Bring them on en masse. Let them defy the rugged weather of spring, grow into summer, bloom into fall. And then, again, let them cause us to dream on through winter.

Diana George Chapin is the NEWS garden columnist. Send horticulture questions to Gardening Questions, 512 North Ridge Road, Montville 04941, or e-mail them to dianagc@midcoast.com. Selected questions will be answered in future columns. Include name, address and telephone number.