I just love sweet peas. So much that I planted an entire package of everlasting sweet peas. Did that turn out to be a mistake!
The flowers were beautiful as they grew along a fence. Deer kept them pruned on the outside of the wire fence, but there were still plenty of flowers to go around. I picked handfuls to put in vases indoors, and there were still lots more flowers. Which of course, meant lots of sweet pea seeds. I collected seeds to strew along other wire fences, the flowers made even a wire fence look pretty. It took another spring before we saw sweet peas coming up everywhere. Not just along a fence line, but everyplace the ground had been stirred. Between the birds and the wind, the sweet peas were on the verge of taking over everything.
Then I remembered where I had seen sweet peas growing wild along roadsides. They looked very pretty there, also. But nothing else grew in the masses of sweet pea vines. Very reluctantly, I took a shovel to the now unwanted plants. It has taken a couple more years and I still find interlopers that need to be dug up. The flower pictured was a surprise, and the plant was immediately put an end to.
I still love seeing sweet peas in the wild. They were planted by someone, or the birds dropped a seed – all it takes is one seed in a favorable environment to start a colony of these flowers. But I keep them out of my garden.
