From £4.99
Thymus x citriodorus Pot Grown Herbs Height: 30 cm Spread: 20 cm Colour: variegated sFrom £4.99
Matucana may be an old-fashioned heirloom grandiflora, but by most accounts it is the most powerfully scented sweet pea of them all. The scent is as arresting as the fabulous colour: a two tone treat of vibrant magenta and deep purple. The resulting fusion of colour and scent is absolutely knockout. It's a prolific flowerer, too, hence the RHS Award of Garden Merit. As always with sweet peas, the more you pick, the more your plants will flower, so get out there every day and snip a few stems for a vase: you may even end up having flowers all the way through until October or November if you're dedicated.
Matucana doesn't have the longest of stems, nor the large flowers of a modern-day Spencer type, so it's not a show grower's variety, and you're better off aiming to pick small posies for a rustic jug rather than long stems for a tall vase. But when the scent's this good, no one's complaining.
Take a look at the rest of our range of sweet peas.
Always grow sweet peas up some kind of support - be that a trellis, obelisk or wigwam of bamboo canes. You can even plant them in the vegetable patch where they'll flower up among the runner beans and help attract pollinators. Or combine them with other colours of sweet peas. Try them with John Gray, a pretty watercolour pink with large flowers, or pure white Mrs Collier, whose perfume is very nearly as intoxicating.
Matucana is a town in central Peru known for its beautiful waterfall.