From away to garden.com and Robinhood Radio.com, this is Away to Garden with Margaret Roach. You're a weekly invitation to dig in and grow. Every year when I get to the sweet pea listings in the seed catalogs, I think this is the year. The year I'll organize some supports in the garden for them and indulge in their unmatched extravagance of color and fragrance. Today's guest doesn't hesitate one second, or have to think twice about sweet peas, ever, which are always on the list in his Massachusetts garden grown, both his cut flowers and elements of beds and borders. More on white, you and I should make room for some in 2024 and how to grow them expertly is next but first these messages. Underwriting support for a way to garden provided by Colorblends wholesale flower bulbs, a third generation bulb company offering top-sized flower bulbs directly to landscape professionals and ambitious residential gardeners at wholesale prices. On the web, Colorblends.com. And by high mowing seeds, WALKUP Vermont offering 30 new seed varieties for 2024, professional quality vegetable, flower, and herbal seeds that are 100% organic and non-GMO project verified. On the web, highmowingseeds.com. Matt Mattis, author of Mastering the Art of Flower Gardening and also of Mastering the Art of Vegetable Gardening, gardens in his Worcester, Massachusetts, home. Matt is the third generation of his family to live and garden there in the same house with its two-acre landscape. He's had a career as a graphic artist and toy designer at Hasbro for many years, but for at least as long he's been passionately designing garden scenes and experimenting with one genus or another in his garden and greenhouse, where he can't resist the impulse to try every last species or variety of something that he can get his hands on. So Matt, good to talk to you again. We should warn people that they may have a seed catalog or a plant catalog shopping binge if they listen to you. How are you? I'm great. Even if it's not looked at, I guess I'm more obsessed than at it, even, but we know we're not alone, right? No, and from your Instagram, your popular Instagram feed and so forth, you know, I see your fun experiments and so forth. And I speak before we get started, I'll say we'll have a book giveaway of your flower

gardening book with the transcript of the show over on away to garden.com.

And so in a New York Times garden column we did recently about a range of annual vines,

I introduced you as a person with a trial gardener's mind because, you know, besides having

that strong design sense, I was just speaking about you also love to sort of try a group of plants or a genus of plants hands on yourself, right? Right, right. I think that's maybe that's the artist in me. You know, that idea of having, you know, a creole of box of crayons with all those colors and curiosity. Like, I want to and and appreciate all those different nuances within a genus or even within a species. So something like zineas or sweet peas or especially with annual flowers you can see you could grow 10, 15, 20 varieties side by side and that's always interesting to see that at Botanic Gardens. So I try to do that here. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because the descriptions do their best to say the distinctions from one to the next. But it's not the same as trying it. Plus there's the variability or the variable rather of, this is my place and this is my conditions. And it's going to grow, this one might do better for me than that one and so on and so forth. I mean, you know, there's that too, right? Right, I think with most annual flowers, you see that, you see those differences, right, with morphology, you see the different forms and shapes, some are short, some are tall, some are have different flower sizes. But with sweet peas, the differences, I think, are mostly with color. I mean, they have a really wide range of color. And they're all beautiful colors. Right. And you've tried, I mean, you've tried necochionas and you have so many lilies you told me about.

You love lilies.

And you're even like, I think, sort of trialed.

You looked for every, what is the salpa glasses?

Salpa glasses.

I mean, do we even grow that?

Does anyone even grow salpa?

How many do you choose to try?

I don't believe anyone grows it anymore.

I think sometimes it's one of those lost, forgotten old-fashioned flowers, but I found an old book from, it was just from the 1930s, but I was in a state gardeners book and saw that South Apaglossus was grown as a greenhouse plant. So for, you know, they would grow annuals in the spring and summer in greenhouses in England for display and conservators. So it's fun to look at those old books and see, maybe that's how I could grow some of these. So yeah, I do those experiments too. Yeah. So with the sweet peas, as you explained to me when we did the time story, you kind of grouped them into roughly two categories. and I'm not trying to say this is the official you know lineup or whatever, but you start talking to me about the antique types with somewhat smaller flowers and these larger flowered spencer types and how you grow and then also use them differently in your garden. So maybe help us a little bit with that because you know you know, I don't think many of us who are first-timers especially, or may have only tried one or two sweepies, know kind of the wide world of it as much. I think even among flower farmers or anyone who's grown sweet peas who've gone to, let's say, a website that specializes just in sweet pea seed. I think everyone's confused with the old classifications, right? They were like, multi-flourers and granda-flourers. And I've even asked my plant-free to friends, like, what does that mean? Right. Those are really old-fashioned classification terms for a lot of flowers. But I mean, basically, in the world of sweet peas, granda floris are anything sort of before 1907 or 1901, depending on where you look. That's when the Spencer varieties, which maybe people have seen those, list the Spencer varieties were developed in England. And those are a larger cut flower type long stems, big flowers. Those, let's say 1905, 1907 that happened. But before that would have been, you know, your grand of florists and multi florists. And those, those are just old fashioned terms, you know, multi-floor officially means is more than four flowers on a stem. But I don't think anybody's care about that. I tried to think of them as old fashioned, just two groups, old fashioned and then Spencer's, because now modern world. Okay, and you use them differently. You create different supports for them and your end product, so to speak, your desire of what they're going to do for you is different. And how do you use those two types? Well, my history history of sweetpeas goes back to the 1980s. Like right out of college, I joined the Sweetpeas Society in England. The Sweetpeas Society, I had no idea. You forgot to tell me that we were doing the time story. The Sweetpeas Society. There is still you could still join the Sweetpeas Society in England. There's a website. I'm sure you can include it in your show notes.

But that's a great source, a resource for sources in England. And for a long time,

the good Sweet Peace Arise could only be bought from England, especially in the 1980s and 1990s.

Now in the US we have far better sources, but I still order some from England too.

But the Sweet Peace Society would hold flower shows through the 20th century. And these, I don't think there's popular say ones were, but that always appealed to me, exhibiting growing for exhibition and Sweet Peas like Dalias, right? I wanted those plants that was grown for exhibition and in England mostly. So that appealed to me and I don't expect people here

to do that, but you could, I mean, you could grow them

in these very strict ways where you limit them

to one stem tied to a bamboo cane,

they call it the cordon method.

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