Re: Lathyrus Relatives
- To:
- Subject: Re: Lathyrus Relatives
- From: B* B*
- Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 11:44:37 +0100
I have just been spending a wet Saturday morning (rain welcome but badly
timed!) catching up on reading the perennials list and the query about
Lathyrus has tempted me out from my usual lurking mode on this list.
Here in the UK, growing sweet peas for the show bench is extremely popular
and most gardeners will grow a few somewhere for picking. Nothing evokes the
English summer more for me than the smell of a vase of sweet peas in the
house. Here they do last most of the summer as long as they are picked
regularly and not allowed to go to seed.
Over the past few years I have grown a few of the other lathyrus species.
L.latifolius is really the best (especially, I think in its white form) It
is so easy and only too reliably perennial! L.nervosus I grew once. The seed
was horribly expensive, but the plant was a real disappointment. The
flowers were quite blue, but very small and not many of them. It was
supposed to be perennial, but all mine (planted in two different locations)
turned up their toes in the winter. Lathyrus vernus is herbaceous and grows
about 12 inches tall, reliable, pretty in spring with pulmonarias and spring
bulbs. I grew mine from seed, but it has set very little seed for me and
none of it has germinated.
Other climbers which I can recommend from experience are L. rotundifolius -
smaller and less vigorous than L latifolius, but with pretty brick red
flowers - reliably perennial with me, and two annuals - L. sativus, which is
a prolifically seeding annual and can in some forms be blue, and L.
chloranthus, which, just for a change has bright yellow flowers. Both these
last two set lots of seed.
If anyone is intersted in more about Lathyrus, there is a very useful
booklet by Sylvia Norton, who has the national collection of Lathyrus in the
UK. I don't know if it is available in the US, but it should be available
from the RHS, who sell it in the bookshop at Wisley.
Barbara Barklem
Woking, Surrey UK
-----Original Message-----
From: BOB CAMPBELL <llebpmac_bob@hotmail.com>
To: perennials@mallorn.com <perennials@mallorn.com>
Date: 18 August 2000 02:20
Subject: Lathyrus Relatives
>I've had so much success with my L. latifolius (still blooming but not as
>heavily as they did in July) that I thought I'd like to branch out a bit.
>Is there anyone on the list growing L. nervosus, L. maritimus or L. vernus.
>I am particularly interested in L. nervosus because of it's blue (really
>blue, not purple) flowers.
>
>Bob Campbell
>
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