Sweet Pea Varieties Worth Growing for Cutting

Sweet peas are the flower Laura grows most obsessively. Over seven seasons on the plot, she's trialled more varieties than she can accurately count. Here's an honest account of what's performed well and what hasn't, based on growing in Shropshire's clay soil and variable summers.

What makes a good cutting variety ¶

For cutting, you want long stems, good scent, and flowers that hold up for at least four to five days in water. Colour matters too, but it's the last thing on the list. A beautiful colour on a short-stemmed, scentless flower is not much use in a bunch.

The old-fashioned varieties generally have better scent than modern ones, which have been bred for larger flowers and more colours at the expense of fragrance. If scent matters to you (and it should. It's half the point of a sweet pea), look for varieties described as 'grandiflora' or 'old-fashioned' rather than 'Spencer' types, which are the large-flowered modern ones.

Varieties we keep growing ¶

Matucana is the one we come back to every year. It's a bicolour. Deep maroon and purple. With a scent that carries across the whole plot on a still morning. The stems are not the longest, but the scent makes up for it. It does best in a dry year; a wet June can cause the flowers to ball (fail to open properly).

Cupani is similar to Matucana and almost as good. It's slightly more vigorous and a little more forgiving in wet conditions. Both are old varieties, pre-1900, and they've been grown continuously since then for good reason.

For a paler colour, we've had good results with a soft lavender variety that we've been saving seed from for four seasons. It's not a named commercial variety any more. We've selected it ourselves from a mixed packet. But it has good stem length and a reliable scent.

What hasn't worked for us ¶

Large-flowered Spencer types look impressive in a catalogue but the scent is often disappointing. We've trialled several and kept none of them. A pale lavender variety sold to us as having 'exceptional fragrance' last season had almost none. A reminder to buy from specialist seed suppliers who actually grow what they sell, rather than general garden centres.

Anything described as a 'heat-tolerant' variety has generally been a disappointment in terms of scent. The heat tolerance is real, but it seems to come at the cost of fragrance.

We save seed from the best plants every year, so each season's crop is slightly different from the last. That's the part of growing that keeps it interesting.