New Sweet Peas Flowers, like robes or hats, have their
fashions ; and our florists both obey and make the popular taste, very much like the fanciers of dogs. Now the sweet pea, that queen of annuals, i always in fashion ; but the colours of its petals go through phases of popularity. For the last two or three years the best of our hybridizers of garden flowers have been intent to produce; not mauves or pinks or the scarcely attainable blue and the quite unattainable yellow, but a mixture of ruddiness and white. The apple-blossom is the ideal. The taste is not entirely capricious. It is found that a certain special lustines4 is correlated with these colours ; and they have the advantage over the reds that they do not burn in the sun. And one must decide that they are inherently lovely, if there is such a thing as absolute loveliness: Splendid examples of the newer sorts are Dobbie's Springtime (especially honoured by the R.H.S.) and Loveliness and Sutton's Ecstasy. They have all the qualities that have made the waved Spenserian sweet pea popular : a waved and ample standard, large flowers well spaced on a stout stalk. As to the number of flowers on a stem they have not equalled Sextet Queen or Sextet Pink (a rather hard coloured novelty), but perhaps four to a stem is as many as we should desire.
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