White Pearl Perennial Sweet Pea Seedlings

Lathyrus latifolius 'White Pearl' Everlasting / Perennial Sweet Pea Plants

A beautiful, pure white. What perennial sweet peas lack in scent, they make up for with vigour and staying power, flowering from mid summer right through to September, and reappearing every year. Insects, especially butterflies, are well supplied by them, as will be your cut flower displays.

Browse our other perennial plants, or our non-perennial annual sweet peas.

Features

• Colour: White
• Climber or Ground cover
• Height: 2m
• Type: Everlasting / Perennial
• Scent: Little to none
• Flowering: June to September
• RHS Plants for Pollinators

Growing Perennial Sweet Peas

Everlasting sweet peas are drought tolerant and the only maintenance required is to cut the whole plant down to the ground once it has finished flowering in autumn. Everlasting sweet peas are hardy and do not need any protection during winter. Grow them up a support for the best display of flowers, or let them sprawl and set seeds as wildlife-friendly ground cover.

All sweet peas are leguminous, so their roots fix nitrogen from the air into the soil, which becomes available to neighbouring plants over time. Extremely easy to please, they can grow like a weed (to the point of being invasive) in any moderately fertile soil with a decent amount of sun.

To prevent them from spreading, either deadhead the flowers, or remove the seedpods while they are still green; when they turn brown and dry out, they will split and flick their seeds a short distance away.

Cut the whole plant down to the ground in Autumn. They are very hardy and do not need protection during winter.

In Your Garden Design

This pure white sweet pea, which has a RHS Award of Garden Merit, would be a great way to bring height without bulk to a white garden, full of roses, cosmos and delphiniums. Stake them prettily wigwam style with tall bamboo canes to allow them to grow up upon and to create an architectural sense of height in a single bed: grow on a sheet of trellis pinned to a wall or fence and plant in front of them making sure you have a route to access the flowers ; or place around a lovely metal structure in the middle of a rose bed - whichever method you choose will look striking and you'll have a consistent supply of lovely scented flowers to bring into the house. The more you cut the more rewarding the more rewarding the flowers will be.

Did You Know?

Lathyrus are native to Europe, and bumblebees are their primary pollinator. A sure way to tell the perennial L. latifolius from annual sweet peas, L. odoratus, is that the former has practically no scent; to make up for this, it is particularly attractive to the brimstone butterfly.

As with sweet peas, the seeds are not suitable for eating. They were used as a famine food in the past, but even in those desperate times people knew that they could only eat a small portion of them each day, mixed with other foods, or they would suffer from a range of permanent disabilities known collectively as Lathyrism.