How Does Your Garden Grow? - In Conversation with Roger Parsons.

By mid-June, the garden has become a midsummer tangle; it's all sweet pea tendrils and rose petals here. The sweet peas grow daily, stretching and weaving their way up the netting and sticks we put up for them many months ago, and then we start to pick... Nothing is sweeter than a handful, armful, bucket-load of sweet peas. June is a golden time for us on the field, primarily because we grow an abundance of sweet peas. They are a firm favourite crop of ours, so when Paris and I formed Alma Proust, we immediately joined the National Sweet Pea Society, knowing it was a flower we wanted to learn as much as possible about over our lifetime.

My first correspondence with Roger Parsons was back in 2020, when I was particularly keen to find the best varieties for stem length. I wanted to grow the best and longest stems for the gift bouquets I specialised in then; Chelsea Centenary, Aphrodite, and Frances Kate were returned as Roger recommended. Over the years, he has continued to be generous with his passion and knowledge, and as the President of the National Sweet Pea Society and the holder of the National Collection of Sweet Peas, Paris and I have long hoped for the chance to talk to him at length and ask him some of our burning sweet pea questions. This June gave us that chance, and we could not believe our luck as we pulled up to his cottage. We hadn't had to travel far, Roger's spot is right in the heart of nursery land, just past our closest city of Chichester, and as we opened the car door, we were hit with the first proper warmth we've had this year, the sound of gulls from the coast punctuated the air above us, mixed with the undeniable scent of sweet peas all around- we knew we were in for a dream-like morning.

We were greeted by Roger, two sweet terriers, and Alison and Fran- two famous sweet peas. He has named two varieties he has raised after his wife, Alison Louise, and his daughter, Frances Kate. Fran now works for the business, too. Over coffee, we plucked up the courage to ask Alison about her miniature horses- if you know Paris and me personally, you may know that we are both equine-brained, with a love of all things tiny. So the visit got even better as Alison led us into their back paddocks that glittered with buttercups, to pat their two current show horses hello. We caught the first glimpse of the towering sweet peas, their colours through the tunnel wall glowing like boiled sweets packed into jars. Their miniature champion of champions, Bo Diddley, a spotted beauty of a stallion of small but perfect stature, didn't deign to get up from his lounging to greet us but continued to keep track of us as we followed the scent of flowers and ventured into the tunnel with Roger.

Our conversation with Roger was one of life's pinch-me moments; I know he'll find that funny, as one of the very first things he said to us over coffee in his kitchen, as he shook his head with laughter, was that he couldn't fathom why anyone would be excited to meet him, but that people who love sweet peas certainly seem to be excited when they do. We were no exception. We were hyped. There was more than one moment when being led by Roger through a tunnel of sweet peas when Paris looked back at me with the maximum amount of joy and luck- I have never seen her brim with glee so much. 

A tagged sweet pea that has been crossed with another & Paris

So here it is—you get to be a fly on the wall… or a miniature horse listening at the tunnel's edge to our conversation with the one and only Roger Parsons.

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The speaker is denoted with their initials. Questions are in bold italics. Actions to set the scene for you are in plain italics.

RP - Roger Parons

MP - Milli Proust

PA - Paris Alma

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Roger Parsons in his sweet pea tunnel

IN CONVERSATION WITH ROGER PARSONS

MP: We are intrigued and inspired by the way knowledge and plant wisdom are passed down from person to person. Can you tell us a bit about the people who have taught you along the way?

RP: Yes, I think the key person is Dr Keith Hamnett in New Zealand; I've met him a number of times. He's in his 80s now and is unlikely to come back to the UK, but when he does, he normally stays with us here, and we've just always got on very well; we think alike. He has quite a lot of knowledge that he has acquired, and people in the past have helped him achieve that; he's always taken the view that he's just the custodian of this knowledge and that he wants to pass it on to other people. He's been so helpful, both in supplying seeds and with the knowledge he's passed on, and that's why I like to help people like yourselves; you'll be the knowledgeable ones that people come to in thirty years' time or whatever!

Paris and Milli laugh

MP: we would love to have enough excellent sweet pea knowledge to share one day!

RP: It was in particular from Keith that I learnt from a very early stage that I could keep sweet pea and other lathyrus seed more or less indefinitely if its stored correctly. And the other thing that he's been particularly inspirational about is breeding. Whereas most people breeding sweet peas in the UK were amateur growers, breeding for exhibition so you get yet another white one or yet another pink one, which may or may not have been marginally better than existing varieties, Keith was the one that started working with what you might call heirloom materials like the old fashioned ones and more or less obsolete varieties, the fact that we enjoy so many bi-coloured sweet peas and varieties with stripes and flakes is mostly down to him. 

A flaked sweet pea that Dr. Keith Hamnett worked on that has never been officially introduced, but one we were very keen to get our hands on & Roger showing us the anthers on a new sweet pea bud

MP: Is there anything in the tunnel you're particularly keen to show and share with us?

RP: I think the most innovative thing I am working with that I want to show you is... are you familiar with King's Ransom?

PA: We love Kings Ransom, we grew it for seed last year and it sold out for us on our autumn seed shop really quickly, and there's already a buzz about it with our customers who have grown it this year, too. Do you find out with Kings Ransom that the National Sweet Pea Society, the growers, and exhibitors like the beauty of King's Ransom as much as home gardeners and florists? 

RP: Some do, but I don't like it (laughs). To my mind, it's a fault, and I’ve told that to Andrew Beane, who raised it! The colour is this sort of cerise, and if you have it in the shade… perhaps you have a bushy clump shaded by surrounding plants, it stays that colour, but in the sun, it changes; this is what they used to call 'burning', and its taken sweet pea breeders 100 years to lose that fault and suddenly everybody likes it (laughs), I think that's one of the things that Keith Hamnett pointed out, that things have their fashions and things pass and move on, so it’s having it’s moment.

King’s Ransom & MM growing in our Alma Proust tunnel

PA: We're growing MM in the tunnel this year, which we think is similar to King’s Ransom but is it without the fault?

RP: It still has the fault, if you were to grow it outside in full sun, the colour would be different. MM was introduced for the new Millennium, hence the name, but because it 'burns' in the sun and doesn't keep its colour, everyone thought it was hideous and just ignored it. I just happened to grow it a couple of years ago to remind myself what it was like. I look after 1300 cultivars, but I can only grow about 150 a year. So I pulled it out and thought I'd have a look at it again, and it actually produced seed well, better than King’s Ransom. And people seem to love it, too.

Did you see on facebook and instagram, we put a post of a flower that arose here which had a burning quality of Kings Ransom but it was flaked?

Roger leads us to a patch of beautiful sweet peas he’s working on from King’s Ransom genetics

MP: We did see it; we thought it was beautiful!

RP: I've never seen anything quite like it, so I saved seed from that one plant, and this has come from it. Now, none of these have that flaking that I thought was so unique. So, what I'm going to do, I'm going to save seeds from these and grow them again, and what I'm hoping is that character from their parent will reappear in the next generation. 

PA: We read that yellow sweet peas are very hard to breed; are there any other characteristics that you'd like to introduce?

RP: Any innovation or novelty is good from my point of view. I like the idea of blue sweet peas; they aren't nearly ever actually blue in true colour terms, and one of the things about Alison Louise is that it's a proper bright blue.

This is Route 66, which is one of Keith Hamnett's; that's a good variety that you get 5 or 6 flowers on. All the bi-colours are on white ground, and this one here was raised by Jim Mcdonald in Hampshire, and it's the first one on cream ground. Having a cream ground bi-colour is a great new introduction, so I've put about 30 plants out of this, and it's absolutely perfect. I haven't had a single rogue, so now that I know this is definitely fixed, I can bulk it up and hopefully introduce it next year. Now that we have the cream in bi-colours, it could lead on to other things.

Sweet pea ‘Our Helen’

MP: You've raised some beautiful varieties; what are the sorts of traits you look for in trialling and breeding 

RP: Flower form is important to me, so when I'm looking at a variety, I'm obsessed with looking at keels. In a spencer you have an open keel, boat shaped, and so that's one of the characteristics of a spencer sweet pea , the old fashioned ones, this is Senator, these have a clamped keel, it's pinched around the reproductive parts of the flower. 

With the clamped keel, you get a much better seed set and are less prone to accidentally cross-pollination, whereas with the old-fashioned ones, they are actually very stable. We know that their description, for the most part,  fits very well with descriptions from Edwardian times. You might think saving seeds for over 100 years would change, but they don't. Whereas the Spencers can revert back, so with the Spencers, as well as looking for colour uniformity, I'm also looking for the form to be correct. If you were doing large-scale production, you haven't got time to look for things like that; in California, for example, they have 60 acres grown in the open ground for seed production, but they aren't doing any rouging- their aim is to produce cheap bulk seed. Clamped keel ones will produce more seed, so they will gradually take over a variety, and interesting variations won't happen so much.  I see my role as the national collection holder to make sure I conserve and maintain the original qualities of individual varieties. If I see one that I think the flowers are a bit small, for example, I'll have a look and see if I think that one's reverting and work on it. 

Senator

A blue sweet pea raised by Roger- this variety has just been bought to be named by a customer and will be introduced next year & Almost Black

PA: How long does it take to raise and introduce a sweet pea?

RP: Sweet pea seeds take a while to be fixed; the salmon pink seems to be the easiest to fix, and they can be fixed in the third year sometimes. The other extreme, bi-colours, are very difficult, and also the one that I know took the longest is Frances Kate, named for my daughter Fran; it took me at least 12 years to fix that, and I kept thinking that I'd just give it one more year and then one more year. Partly, Fran loved it, which is why I named it for her, and I loved it too. 

MP: Do you have an idea of what the perfect sweet pea is for you?

RP: Yes, I do! I told you about how much I like Alison Louise, that's one I raised. I had wanted to name a sweet pea after my wife, and finally, this sweet pea I had worked on was one I loved enough to be deserving of her name. So, like Alison Louise, the perfect sweet pea for me has big frilly flowers and long stems. It's got perhaps six flowers on a stem with no gaps. It is nice, evenly spaced, and has a very good fragrance. I don't mind what colour it is, just the form.

If you're growing them for exhibition, which is where I started off you just want 4 flowers, they will be bigger but the flowers will be evenly spaced out. That's why Alison Louise is my favourite and I suppose I do like the blue ones best.

Roger leads us to the end of the row and down the next row, ducking under a low tunnel of blooms and holding them up for us to pass underneath. 

Roger holding up overhanging sweet peas for us to pass through & Blue vein

RP: This is the best way to enjoy sweet peas- right in the thick of them!

MP: Oh, one of my favourites! Suzy Z! 

PA: OOOOOOH! What's this one?

RP: That's King's Coronation, which is new this year. Raised by King's seeds.

Suzy Z

MP: Is there anything in particular that you do to your beds in preparation for the Sweet Pea crop?

RP: A lot of the old-fashioned guidance was working in plenty of manure and things like that, and although you want good soil, you don't want it overly rich. I never used to feed my plants at all; I thought they were in good soil; they are legumes that'll fix their own nitrogen, and I wouldn’t feed them. I was won over by the idea of foliar feeding, so even from quite an early stage, before they get planted out, I'll spray my plants with a feed; it works. I get such wonderful growth; the thinking behind it is that encouraging vigorous growth then builds up the plant's ability to resist pests and diseases more. It might be a coincidence, but I haven't seen a single aphid in here this year, and the powdery mildew is only starting to come in now that I've stopped spraying. Once a fortnight, I spray with trace elements and micronutrients after testing the soil. It might seem wonderful soil to me, but it actually sorts some of the minor nutrients, probably because I've been growing sweet peas on it for the last 20-odd years! In the alternate week, I include a feed, and that helps with the powdery mildew in this hot and dry environment. I'm a great fan of foliar feeding nowadays.

Lathyrus latifolius ‘Blushing Bride’ & Roger with a bi-colour

PA: Is there anything you do to keep the varieties from getting mixed up when it comes to seed collecting?

RP: Two or three times a week I come in to do some 'sheveling'- (laughs) it's a word I made up, It comes from the plants not being disheveled, if they aren't disheveled they must be 'sheveled' mustn't they! An important part of sheveling is making sure you can see the gap, especially if you're going to do more of the seed production.

PA: That's what we're keen to do, and we'd love to breed; even raising just one sweet pea would be so much fun for us!

MP: An amazing one came up in our tunnel last week. It had chartreuse buds, silvery ground and smoky lavender veining... and then we accidentally rouged it out.

RP: We've all done it! 

We all laugh (albeit through the emotional pain of special new varieties lost forever)

PA: We're glad to hear that! It wasn't meant to be!

MP: It feels so exciting to make new discoveries with crosses; the breeding is so interesting and such a learning curve for us.

RP: This is one that I've bred, but you can see there are variations. Apart from the fact that the colour isn't fixed, some are non-tendrils. You can see here that some have tendrils and some don't, so I've been working on it again this year. I'm growing more stock of it on another row that I saved from a single pod, and it's all come true. 

PA: It's so interesting to see the different leaves on the non-tendril.

RP: Yes, it is. It's thought that a more primitive form of the sweet pea would have had this leaf form. You see it a bit with lathyrus vernus the spring pea. And as an adaptation, a lot of the leaflets have formed into tendrils to let it climb.

A non-tendril leaf & the Sweet Pea that Roger has bred and talking about above

MP: What is your favourite method for starting sweet peas from seed, and would you share it with our readers who are interested in sowing them from seed?

RP: I sow a single seed per root trainer at the end of October. So these were planted in the ground under cover of the tunnel in early February and some of the early flowering varieties (the winter flowering ones) started flowering in April but they don't really get going until May. Normally the second week in June is when it's at its peak, but this year it really was at its peak at the end of May.

MP: Roger, this has been the best morning. Thank you for having us and being so generous with your time and knowledge!

PA: We've loved every second of it!

Roger