Noel Sutton Sweet Peas

Noel Sutton Sweet Peas

This sweet pea is a real stunner, with its mid-lilac deeply scented flowers, gently ruffled at the edges of the petals, and held on long, sturdy stems. This means not only will they give you months of glorious colour out in the garden, but they're also brilliant for cutting and arranging in vases indoors. In fact, as with all sweet peas, the more flowers you cut, the more flowers you'll get. Leave them to set seed and the plant will slowly stop blooming. So keep snipping! It's an RHS AGM winner, too, so you're pretty much guaranteed a great-performing sweet pea.

Take a look at the rest of our range of sweet peas.

Our Sweet Peas are delivered in purpose-designed, recycled cardboard packaging, and are ready to be planted out when you get them.
We generally send them out between March and May, but we will email you with the likely delivery timescale once you have placed your order.

Grow him in a sunny spot in beds and borders, or in a pot, always with a good support system to scramble up. This could be a trellis, a wigwam of canes or hazel branches, or an obelisk, and tie in the shoots, to begin with, to help them get a firm hold and grow well. Other than this, sweet peas (especially seedlings) are really simple to grow, but do remember to keep them well watered - all sweet peas like a good well-irrigated root run, or they can suffer from mildew. A good soak with a hose every couple of days in hot weather should do the trick.

A harmonious partnership

Plant Noel Sutton with a couple of other varieties of sweet pea for an even more fabulous show. Its purple flowers look particularly regal paired with ivory white Jilly, or try planting alongside pinky-blue Anniversary for a pairing of similarly dreamy shades. To dial up the scent to maximum, create a border of summer perfume, by planting your sweet pea seedlings with climbers such as honeysuckles or jasmines: just make sure there's a bench nearby, so you can linger and enjoy the scent.

Features

• Colour: mid-lilac
• Stem: long
• Height: 1.8m
• Type: Spencer
• Scent: strong
• Flowering: June to September
• Planting Months: March-June
• RHS Award of Garden Merit

Plant Noel Sutton Sweet Peas in well prepared, moist soil that ideally was enriched with organic matter the previous autumn (if you did not do it then, do it now!). Erect supports for the peas to climb up before planting. They can also be planted in pots of sufficient size - allow 6 litres per plant - and with an ideal planting medium of 50% compost, 40 %top soil and 10% well-rotted manure. General purpose compost will do however but produces fewer flowers.

The principal requirement is enough water - Sweet Peas are thirsty and hungry plants. They can cope with a little shade but flower better in full sun.

Space each plant about 30 cm apart and about 5 cm from its support. The hole should be deep enough to accommodate the longest root and the soil should come up to the level of the first side shoot. Use wire/netting/twine between the supports so that the Sweet Pea can climb naturally. You will still need to tie them in to the frame. They grow fast, so check every ten days or so.

Water well; the soil around sweet peas should never dry out. As the flowers develop pick them and then pick again, otherwise they start to form seedpods and will stop flowering altogether. Keep tying in and picking for as long as you can. Perfectionists will remove the curling tendrils which grip other stems and can result in flowers with wiggly stems and also will remove side shoots. see the website for more advice on training sweetpeas.

By all means apply a high potash and phosphate fertiliser during the growing season. (Sweet Peas actually fix nitrogen from the air into the soil so you don't need more of that.) Home-made comfrey liquid is perfect or Tomorite will do especially if you are on a sandy soil.

Did You Know?

Introduced by Suttons Seeds in 1968, and it's been hugely popular ever since. It's one of the most reliably lilac-blue sweet peas.