'Lord Nelson' Sweet Pea Plants

Lord Nelson Sweet Pea

It's hard to describe Lord Nelson's colour - a cross between Elizabeth Taylor's eyes and a tropical sea on a cloudy day - suffice to say they're a deep violet, navy colour of real depth and beauty. The petals are slightly veined which gives the small but plentiful flowers a look of fragility which entirely belies this extraordinarily tough seadog. The flowers cover the sturdy stems and are so highly scented that they'll fill your garden with perfume, and then your house if they're planted nearby.
Browse our list 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.

Features

• Colour: navy/violet-purple
• Stem: short
• Height: 2m
• Type: Heirloom Grandiflora
• Scent: highly scented
• Flowering: May to August
• Planting Months: March-June

Garden Design Ideas

The colour of this sweet pea shouldn't be confined to below decks in the vegetable garden but should be there like a great wave of colour in your borders trailed over a tepee or some such. Lord Nelson flowers so prolifically and its exotic blue works well with pale blues, lavenders and pastels to bright golds, reds or silvers. Try harbouring Lord Nelson next to a shrub rose like or intertwined with his honeysuckle for an out of this world scent sensation. Other old-fashioned sweet peas include the lovely Flora Norton, King Edward V11 or Mrs Collier as suitable first mates or another port of call could be to grow some of the more modern Spencer varieties as a contrast.

History & Trivia

Lord Nelson was the Admiral who both won and was killed at Trafalgar in 1805, now immortalised annually in this sweet pea. It was introduced in 1907 by Henry Eckford's sweet pea breeding programme at Isaac House in Wiltshire, and remains an extraordinarily popular.