The Sweet Pea Diaries

 “The garden,” says writer Anne Lamott, “is one of the two great metaphors for humanity…[It] is about life and beauty and the impermanence of all living things…You pour yourself into it, care so much, and see up close so much birth, and growth, and beauty, and danger, and triumph.”

I’d only ever been interested in monitoring (and eating) the strawberries but this year, with some seeds given by a friend for Imbolc, there is the motivation to attempt to grow something myself. It seemed like it might all be a bit high maintenance at first (all that potting, repotting, watering, planting out). But I remembered how nice sweet peas could look and smell and they’re not something you can get beside the meal deals in Tesco.

It’s late March when I poke the seeds into compost in little tubs in the greenhouse, wondering how exactly they’ll come to life, how they can tell when they’re ready to go. There is a thrill when, a couple of weeks later, tiny green shoots emerge.

I check the seedlings every morning, tentatively opening the greenhouse door like a doctor doing rounds, pressing the back of a hooked finger to the soil. I’m checking for dampness but it’s like I’m checking their pulse. They all grow at a different pace, one or two clearly thriving and already with the pairs of leaves you look out for.

But April is cold and stormy and I’m wondering whether the chill is stunting their growth. None of the plants have three pairs of leaves yet, the point at which you apparently take off the tip to encourage outward growth. I add a splash of plant food to each then worry it’s unsuitable and that I’ve poisoned them.

In the middle of the month temperatures are still barely reaching double figures (we have had snow in April before) but there is warmth in the sun when it does appear and the plants are showing promise. Most of them have three - even four pairs - of leaves now and I pinch off the top part as if I know what I’m doing. Looking at the bottom of the flower pots I can see that some of the roots are beginning to peek through the holes - delicate white tendrils finding their way out of the dark - and I repot into bigger, deeper containers. Slicing an old knife around the edges, I prise the plants away but the compost is crumblier than I expected and I have to tenderly grasp the plants’ roots to move them, with no idea if they’re fragile or not. It will likely be another two or three weeks before it’s warm enough to put them outside.

After one daily check up, with the tendrils of the sweet peas now beginning to curl and stretch, I go to look at the spot where I planted, nonchalantly and without any expectations, some seeds directly in the cold ground outside. Green shoots have appeared. The furled, almost waxy, leaves of sweet peas I now recognise are emerging from the stems. The grey seeds are not languishing underground like I’d assumed, but have been brought to life by the brief warm spell, or are just determined to find their way out.

It’s not until the third week of May that it is warm enough, calm enough for it to feel like it’s time to plant outside. I put two into bigger containers either side of steps with metal railings which I hope will be a framework for the flowers to climb. Three others are put straight into the ground against some driftwood and I imagine a tangle of green in high summer like the forest of thorns in Sleeping Beauty. I gather the cool dark soil back over the plants, water and hope and wait.

The sweet peas become a distraction from the wider world and something of an obsession - a small thing to wholly focus on and manage. I look at them morning and night, checking how the tendrils have moved, deciding whether the plants need watered.

On a morning in May, when the rest of the country explodes into a heatwave, I am kneeling in a cool breeze tying the sweet peas to their supports - the metal railings of steps, the thick chunks of driftwood. The plants are climbing higher and clinging to themselves, tendrils gripping like tiny fists. I peel them gently apart so I can coax the them in the right direction. In the grey afternoon light, as ragged pink peonies dance nearby in the wind, I check that the sweet peas are secure - untucking one I worry I’ve crushed under the string.

June is warm and wet and progress is noticeable. There are still no flowers but the tendrils are clinging to the railings at the steps, are becoming entwined in the nicks and grooves of the wood. One of the sweet peas planted directly into the ground as a seed has found its way to a wire attached to the greenhouse. It coils around it neatly and I’m slightly in awe at how it knows where to go. But as the other plants become more abundant, more sprawling, I get less sentimental and am ruthless in plucking snail-eaten leaves or pulling off a stem that has snapped and died: the creation and destruction of the garden…

It’s around this time I think about my own creativity, the writing I try to nurture too. After more rejection and a lack of success in a competition that stings more than usual, I wonder what I bother and vow never to write anything again. 

It’s a sunny, blustery morning when the first flower emerges. It has opened up like a butterfly and yes there is a little gasp when I see the delicate petals quivering in the wind: one pair milk-white with another pair the colour of Barbie’s shoes. I’d spotted the buds about a week before, but then they were pale and mottled and the exact shape and colour of peach slices. On the morning after a thunderstorm, holding on to raindrops, they looked like they were encrusted with diamonds. I go and look at the flower about five times that day. I wonder how many there’ll be, what other colours will appear. Buds on the other plants are wine-red or look like tiny aubergines. 

The flowers will last just a summer, a bunch given in a jar probably a week. But as it is with many things, their impermanence, the briefness of the pleasure they give, is sort of the point. They are part of the cycle of tiny things that keep life going. 

“And then everything dies anyway, right?,” adds Anne Lamott. “But you just keep doing it.”

I write again, enter more competitions and wait for more flowers to emerge. The strawberries are ready to pick now too.