Sweet Pea Flower Meaning: Blissful Pleasure, Fond Farewells, and 300 Years of Scent
In 1699, a Sicilian monk named Franciscus Cupani posted a handful of seeds from a friary near Palermo to an English schoolmaster in Enfield.
The flower that came up was small, bicolored, and absurdly fragrant. Three hundred years later it is one of the most recognizable scents in the English-speaking garden.
The sweet pea flower meaning most florists cite is blissful pleasure — but the Victorians gave it a second, stranger job. They also used it to say goodbye.
That double life is what makes it interesting. One bloom that means I loved every minute and I am leaving now, often in the same bouquet.
Here is how sweet pea symbolism breaks down by color, by era, and by occasion — plus the one thing almost everyone gets wrong about the plant.
🌸 Flower Profile
| Scientific Name | Lathyrus odoratus |
| Family | Fabaceae (the pea and bean family) |
| Origin | Sicily, southern Italy, and the Aegean islands |
| Blooming Season | Late spring through midsummer, with a long season if picked daily |
| Primary Meaning | Blissful pleasure, delicate gratitude, and a fond farewell |
Color Meanings
Table of Contents
- 1. Pink
- 2. White
- 3. Red and Scarlet
- 4. Purple and Violet
- 5. Lavender and Pale Blue
- 6. Maroon and Chocolate
- 7. Cream and Ivory
- 8. Bicolor, Striped, and Flaked
1. Pink
Meaning: Blissful pleasure, tender early love, and thank you for a lovely time
💡 At a Glance
Shade Variations: Blush and shell pink — the softest reading: new affection, something still forming.
Rose pink — the Countess Spencer register. Gratitude with real warmth behind it.
Coral and salmon pink — cheerfulness and appetite for life. These shades glow under evening light and read almost orange in photographs.
Cerise and raspberry pink — confident, flirtatious, nearly a declaration. Use sparingly or it shouts down everything else in the vase.
Stems & Styling: Sweet peas have short, wiry stems, so forget the tall ceremonial bouquet. Their natural home is a posy or a cluster of bud vases.
- Five to seven stems per small vase is the sweet spot — enough scent to fill a room without heaviness.
- Twelve stems of mixed pinks makes a proper gift posy; tie low with ribbon so the heads stay loose.
- Pair with astrantia, cornflower, or a few sprigs of mint for a gathered-from-the-garden look.
- Avoid stiff partners. Pink sweet peas next to formal hybrid tea roses look like a child at a board meeting.
Start at Althorp, Northamptonshire.
It is 1901. The Spencer family estate is running a glasshouse operation that would embarrass most commercial nurseries.
Silas Cole is the head gardener. He has been crossing sweet peas for years, chasing size.
What he gets instead is texture. A pink flower with petals that wave and frill like crepe paper.
He names it Countess Spencer and shows it. The sweet pea world loses its mind.
Within a decade, the old flat-petaled grandifloras are commercially dead. Everything is Spencer now.
Here is the part that makes pink sweet peas worth giving.
The Edwardians did not send them to propose. They sent them afterward.
After the weekend in the country. After the dinner. After the summer ended.
Pink sweet peas were the flower of the pleasant thing that already happened.
That is a narrower emotion than love, and a more honest one.
The scent does the same work. It is sugary, almost orange-blossom, and it fades fast.
A jar of pink sweet peas gives you four good days and then it is over.
Nobody who has grown them mistakes that for a flaw. It is the point.
So: give pink sweet peas to the host who fed you, the friend who drove six hours, the person whose summer you borrowed.
Not to say I want something. To say that was good, and I noticed.
2. White
Meaning: Sincere thanks, pure intention, and a blessing on someone's departure> 💡 At a Glance
Shade Variations: Pure chalk white — crisp and formal. Reads best in daylight and photographs cleanly.
Ivory and cream — warmer, kinder, and far more flattering next to skin tones and old wood. The cultivar Mrs Collier, introduced in the Edwardian period, is still the benchmark cream.
Blush-flushed white — petals with the faintest pink breath at the edge. These carry the gentlest farewell meaning: affection that is not quite willing to let go.
Green-white buds — unopened white sweet peas read as not yet. Useful in a bouquet when you want the idea of something beginning.
Stems & Styling: White sweet peas are the easiest sweet pea to style and the easiest to waste.
- Keep them alone, or with one soft partner like lily of the valley or white astrantia. Crowding kills the effect.
- Three stems in a tiny bottle beside a bed is a genuinely lovely gesture for someone unwell or leaving.
- For buttonholes, bind three white blooms with a single myrtle leaf. Myrtle is the traditional British royal wedding green and it holds up without water for a few hours.
- Never spray-paint or dye white sweet peas. The petals are too thin and the result looks plastic.
The strangest thing in the Victorian flower dictionaries is the sweet pea entry.
Most flowers get one meaning. Sweet pea gets two that pull in opposite directions.
Delicate pleasures. And departure.The blame, or credit, usually lands on John Keats.
In 1817 he wrote a line about sweet peas on tip-toe for a flight, with wings of gentle flush over delicate white.Look at the flower and you see what he saw.
The standard petal lifts like a sail. The wings sit out to each side.
The whole bloom is shaped like something about to leave.
White makes it more obvious than any other color. There is nothing to look at but the shape.So the white sweet pea became the goodbye flower that is not sad.
Not a funeral flower. A send-off flower.
The Edwardians used it for emigrants, brides, and soldiers, and the logic holds up.If you need a flower for someone moving across the country next week, this is it.
Three white stems in a jar. No speech required.
The flower has been doing that particular job for over a hundred years.
3. Red and Scarlet
Meaning: Declared affection, courage, and pleasure taken openly> 💡 At a Glance
Shade Variations: Bright scarlet — the showiest sweet pea color and the hardest to place. Reads as celebration more than romance.
Crimson — deeper, cooler, closer to classic romantic red. Pairs well with cream to keep it from going heavy.
Cherry and raspberry red — a pink undertone softens the declaration into something playful.
Brick and rust red — unusual in sweet peas and wonderful in autumn-toned arrangements. Suggests affection that has survived some weather.
Note the trick of the light: many red sweet peas have a faint blue cast to the petal that makes them photograph slightly purple. Shoot them in shade, not direct sun.
Stems & Styling: Red sweet peas overwhelm fast because the color is strong and the flower is small.
- Use a one-to-three ratio — one red stem for every three pale stems. You get the punch without the noise.
- Seven scarlet stems alone in a plain white jug is a surprisingly bold gift. Minimal and loud at once.
- Pair with cream sweet peas or green alchemilla, never with yellow. Yellow and scarlet sweet peas fight.
- For an anniversary posy, mix red with pink and tie with twine rather than satin. Satin pushes it into Valentine territory, which is not this flower's natural habitat.
Henry Eckford deserves more credit than he gets.
He was a working gardener in Shropshire, not a gentleman botanist.When he started, sweet peas came in about five colors and smelled lovely.
When he finished, there were over a hundred named varieties and the flower had its own national society.
Red was one of his hard problems. Pea-family pigments do not hand you scarlet easily.What he produced was a red unlike a rose red.
Thinner petals. More light passing through.
A sweet pea in scarlet looks lit from behind even on an overcast day.That translucency is why the meaning stayed light.
A red rose is a statement with weight behind it. A red sweet pea is a statement made cheerfully.
It says yes, obviously rather than I have thought about this for months.Use it accordingly.
First anniversaries, sweet peas being the traditional first-anniversary flower. Good news. A thank-you with some swagger in it.
Not a proposal. The flower does not have the shoulders for it.
4. Purple and Violet
Meaning: Devotion with history behind it, dignity, and remembrance> 💡 At a Glance
Shade Variations: Maroon-and-violet bicolor — the Cupani and Matucana register. Historic, intensely scented, small-flowered.
Royal purple — the dignified reading. Formal, a little serious, excellent for milestone gifts.
Mauve and heliotrope — softer and dustier, with a faintly antique quality. These are the shades that make a bouquet look like a Dutch painting.
Violet with blue lights — cool and ethereal. Fades toward silver as the bloom ages, which some growers consider the flower's best trick.
Stems & Styling: Purple sweet peas are the scent engine of any mixed sweet pea bunch. Build around them.
- Five heirloom Matucana stems will perfume a whole kitchen. More than that in a small room is genuinely too much.
- Pair with cream or pale lavender to keep the purple from going murky. Purple with dark red reads as a bruise.
- For a milestone gift — a retirement, a graduation, a long marriage — purple sweet peas with a card explaining the Cupani story is a far better present than it sounds.
- Cut heirloom types in the early morning. Their scent peaks before the day heats up and so does their vase life.
Picture a friary near Palermo in the 1690s.Franciscus Cupani is a monk with a serious botanical habit. He catalogs Sicilian plants.
One of them is a scrambling vine with a small two-tone flower that smells like nothing else on the island.
He sends seeds to England. This is a slow, unreliable thing to do in 1699.They arrive. They germinate. Robert Uvedale grows them in Enfield.
Three hundred and twenty-odd years later you can buy the same flower in a paper packet for the price of a coffee.
That is an unusually unbroken chain for a garden plant.Here is what nobody warns you about purple sweet peas.
The flowers are small. Noticeably smaller than the show varieties.
And then you lean in, and the argument is over.Sicily is also where Greek myth put the abduction of Persephone — the fields of Enna, flowers picked, a girl taken underground, a mother turning the world to winter.
No ancient source names the sweet pea in that story. The flower was simply never written down.
But it was growing there. That is a quieter kind of history than a myth, and it is real.Give purple sweet peas when the point is continuity.
Anniversaries past the tenth. Retirements. Anyone who has been doing something well for a long time.
The flower is the oldest thing in the vase and it knows it.
5. Lavender and Pale Blue
Meaning: Serenity, nostalgia, and a goodbye made gently> 💡 At a Glance
Shade Variations: Palest lavender-grey — the most nostalgic shade in the genus. Looks faded the moment it opens, in the best way.
Wisteria and heliotrope lavender — warmer, with visible pink in the petal. Reads as affectionate rather than wistful.
Deep velvety blue-violet — the closest sweet peas get to real blue, and genuinely striking in shade. Loses its blue cast entirely in bright sun.
Lavender with white wings — bicolor forms where the wing petals go nearly white. These suggest a feeling that is clearing rather than deepening.
Stems & Styling: Pale lavender sweet peas disappear in big arrangements. Scale down and they come alive.
- Use a colored glass vessel — amber or smoke grey. Clear glass lets pale lavender vanish against the background.
- Mix with white and palest pink only. Lavender plus strong yellow is one of the few genuinely unpleasant flower combinations.
- Nine stems of mixed lavender shades in a single posy reads as deliberate rather than washed out.
- Lavender sweet peas are the best choice for a sympathy posy. They say the gentle thing without announcing it.
Gardeners are stubborn about blue.
Blue rose. Blue dahlia. Blue sweet pea.The sweet pea has refused for a hundred and forty years.
What it offers instead is lavender, and lavender that will not hold still.
The same flower looks blue in morning shade and mauve by three in the afternoon.Gertrude Jekyll understood this kind of color better than anyone.
She trained as a painter before her eyesight pushed her into garden design.Her borders worked because she treated pale tones as the thing that gives everything else air.
A lavender sweet pea does that job in a vase. It makes the pinks look better.
On its own it almost looks like nothing. In company it is the reason the bunch works.Which is a fair description of its meaning too.
Lavender sweet pea is the flower for feelings that do not want a spotlight.
Missing someone mildly. Being glad about something that ended.Send it to someone grieving, or someone moving away, or someone you have not spoken to in two years.
It will not demand a response. That is why it works.
6. Maroon and Chocolate
Meaning: Deep, settled devotion and the bittersweet end of something good> 💡 At a Glance
Shade Variations: Burgundy and wine — rich, warm, and flattering. The most wearable dark shade for bouquets.
Near-black maroon — the Black Knight register. Dramatic in daylight, invisible in dim rooms. Always pair it with something pale.
Chocolate and oxblood — brownish-dark shades with real depth. Unusual, and beautiful with rust and copper tones.
Maroon-and-violet bicolor — the heirloom original, which sits between this color and purple and is arguably the best-smelling sweet pea in existence.
Stems & Styling: Dark sweet peas need light next to them or they read as holes in the arrangement.
- Always include cream or white stems. A fifty-fifty split of maroon and cream is the single most striking sweet pea combination there is.
- Use a pale vessel. Dark flowers in a dark vase vanish.
- Three maroon stems as an accent in a pink posy adds depth without gloom.
- These are the sweet peas for autumn weddings and dark-palette table settings. They sit beautifully with dahlias, which flower at the same end of the season.
Nobody breeds a near-black flower by accident.
It takes decades of deliberately selecting the darkest seedling in the row.Eckford's Black Knight arrived in the 1890s and the name tells you exactly what the Victorians thought of it.
Not dark maroon number four. A knight.They loved this register. Gothic novels, mourning jewelry, dark flowers in the border.
A near-black bloom on a cottage vine was not morbid to them. It was romantic, in the capital-R sense.The modern version of that taste arrived about ten years ago.
Wedding florals swung hard away from blush and into burgundy.
Dark dahlias. Chocolate cosmos. And sweet peas the color of old wine.Here is the practical thing to know.
Maroon sweet peas are nearly invisible at dusk and spectacular at eleven in the morning.
If you are planning a dark palette for an evening event, add candlelight or add cream.As a gift, this color is specific.
It suits long marriages, last days at a beloved job, and the end of something you were genuinely sorry to see finish.
It is not a cheerful flower. It is a loyal one.
7. Cream and Ivory
Meaning: Quiet elegance, understated thanks, and warmth without display> 💡 At a Glance
Shade Variations: Clotted cream — warm, rich, and slightly golden in the throat. The most flattering sweet pea color against old silver and brass.
Ivory — cooler and cleaner, nearly white but softer. The Mrs Collier register.
Buff and biscuit — faintly tan, unusual, and lovely in autumnal mixes.
Cream with a pink flush — the edges blush as the flower ages. A gift that changes over its four days in the vase.
Stems & Styling: Cream is the universal donor of sweet pea arranging. It goes with everything in the genus.
- Use it to bridge colors that fight. Cream between scarlet and lavender fixes an arrangement that was not working.
- Cream alone, fifteen stems, in a brass or silver vessel is quietly expensive-looking and costs almost nothing to grow.
- Pair with maroon for the highest-contrast sweet pea combination, or with blush pink for the softest.
- Cream sweet peas brown at the petal edge first. Pull tired stems rather than trying to hide them, or the whole bunch looks past it.
The yellow sweet pea does not exist.
This bothers people more than you would expect.Victorian breeders tried. Edwardian breeders tried.
Catalogs printed names that promised yellow and delivered cream, and gardeners complained in print about it.In the 1980s, botanists found a wild pea relative in southern Turkey with honest yellow flowers.
Crossing it into the garden sweet pea turned out to be very hard. The work is still going.Meanwhile cream quietly won.
Mrs Collier came out in the Edwardian period and people are still sowing her.
That is a longer run than almost any show variety of the same era managed.Cream sweet peas are the ones I would actually recommend to someone buying for the first time.
They go with every other color. They photograph well in any light.
And in a plain brass cup they look like something arranged by a person with taste, which requires no taste at all.The meaning fits the color precisely.
Give cream sweet peas when you want to be kind without making it an event.
The neighbor who took in your parcels. The colleague who covered for you. Low-key gratitude, properly done.
8. Bicolor, Striped, and Flaked
Meaning: Mixed feelings held honestly, and a complicated goodbye> 💡 At a Glance
Shade Variations: Pink over white — the Painted Lady pattern. Soft, antique, and the gentlest version of mixed feelings.
Maroon standard with violet wings — the Cupani original. Historic and intensely fragrant.
Red and white striping — the America pattern. Bold, slightly carnival, and surprisingly hard to place in modern arrangements.
Flaked and feathered types — fine pinstripes of purple or rose over cream. These look hand-painted and reward being put somewhere you will actually look at them closely.
Stems & Styling: Patterned sweet peas are busy. Give them room or they turn to visual static.
- Keep the rest of the bunch plain and pale. One patterned type plus cream is the whole recipe.
- Never mix two different stripe patterns. Painted Lady with America reads as a mistake.
- A single flaked stem in a tiny bottle on a desk is a genuinely interesting object. These are flowers for close looking, not room-filling.
- Heirloom bicolors have the shortest stems in the genus. Choose a vessel under four inches or you will be fishing them out of the water.
Painted Lady is from about 1737.
Sit with that for a second.That flower was being grown while Bach was still writing.
It went through the entire Victorian breeding boom, the Spencer revolution, two world wars, and the twentieth-century collapse of scented varieties.
And it is in seed catalogs this spring.It survived because somebody kept saving the seed. Usually somebody with no commercial reason to.
Heirloom sweet peas are entirely a gift from obsessives.The bicolor meaning is my favorite thing about this flower.
Two colors, one bloom. Mixed feelings, stated plainly.
There is no other common garden flower that does that job as cleanly.It is the right flower for the complicated situations.
Leaving a job you half loved. A friendship that has shifted. A move you wanted and are still sad about.In the last decade these old patterned types came back hard.
Small flower farms rebuilt the market because sweet peas cannot survive a shipping container, which means they cannot be industrialized.
To get one, somebody near you has to grow it. That constraint turned out to be the flower's best feature.
Gift Guide by Occasion
1. First wedding anniversary
Sweet pea is the traditional first-anniversary flower, which makes this the single most appropriate occasion for it. Give a mixed posy of pink, cream, and one maroon stem — twelve stems total, tied with twine, in a small jug rather than wrapped in cellophane. Pair it with a packet of Cupani seeds so they can grow the same flower next summer. That turns a four-day gift into an annual one, which is a better anniversary metaphor than anything you could write in a card.
2. April birthday
Sweet pea is the April birth flower alongside the daisy, and it happens to be in season for late-spring birthdays in most of the northern hemisphere. Go pink or coral for warmth. Skip the florist arrangement and buy a bunch from a market stall, then split it across three small bud vases — scent in three rooms beats volume in one. If the birthday is late April, locally grown stems will be available and will smell five times stronger than imported ones.
3. Farewell or going-away party
This is the meaning sweet pea was built for. White or pale lavender stems carry the departure reading without any sadness in it. Keep it small and portable — someone leaving the country does not want a vase to carry. Five stems wrapped in damp paper and brown kraft is correct. Say the meaning out loud when you hand it over; the Victorian sense of go well is genuinely moving and almost nobody knows it anymore.### 4. Thank you after being hosted
The Edwardian use case, and still the best one. Cream or pink sweet peas, seven to nine stems, sent the day after rather than brought on the night. Arriving with flowers makes your host find a vase while cooking; arriving the next morning is thoughtful. Include a note that says what you are thanking them for specifically — the meal, the bed, the lift to the station. Sweet pea means delicate pleasures and it works best when you name the pleasure.
5. Wedding bouquets and buttonholes
Sweet peas are the best-scented flower you can put in a June or July bouquet, and they cost a fraction of imported alternatives. Use them as the fragrance layer in a loose garden-style bouquet with astrantia, lily of the valley, and soft greenery. Critical practical note: sweet peas have a short vase life and wilt in heat, so they must be conditioned in cool water and the bouquet assembled the morning of, not the day before. For buttonholes, three blooms bound with a myrtle leaf will hold for about four hours — fine for a ceremony, not for an all-day outdoor wedding in August.
6. New baby or christening
Ivory and blush sweet peas suit this better than the usual gerbera-and-cellophane hospital bunch, because the scent is soft rather than aggressive and new parents are not short on stimulation. Keep it to three small vases of five stems so they are not managing a large arrangement in a chaotic week. One serious warning: sweet pea seeds and pods are toxic if eaten, despite the plant being a pea relative. Send cut flowers, never a potted plant, to a house with a crawling baby or a chewing dog.
7. Sympathy and remembrance
Pale lavender sweet peas are among the kindest sympathy flowers available, because they say the gentle thing without the formality of lilies. The departure meaning lands differently here — not as a goodbye you are choosing, but as one being acknowledged. Send a small posy to the home rather than an arrangement to the service; it is the week afterward when flowers actually help. Nine stems of mixed pale shades in a jar that does not need to be returned.
The sweet pea has no Greek myth of its own, and the reason is almost more interesting than a myth would be.
It grew wild in Sicily and the Aegean islands for the whole classical period and nobody wrote it down. Those same Sicilian flower meadows gave Greek myth the abduction of Persephone — the fields of Enna, a girl gathering blooms, a mother turning the world to winter until her daughter came back for half the year.
It is a story about departure and return, set exactly where the sweet pea was flowering, and the flower kept the theme without ever being named in the text.
The documented history begins in the 1690s with Franciscus Cupani, a Sicilian monk who catalogued the plants around his friary and posted seeds to England in 1699. By 1700 the plant had a published description out of Amsterdam, and by the 1730s English gardens had Painted Lady, the pink-and-white bicolor still sold today.
Then the Victorians got hold of it. Henry Eckford in Shropshire bred it from five colors into more than a hundred varieties, Silas Cole at Althorp produced the ruffled Countess Spencer in 1901, and the National Sweet Pea Society filled Crystal Palace with exhibition stands.
For roughly thirty years, between about 1890 and the First World War, the sweet pea was the most fashionable flower in Britain — the orchid of its moment, with the snobbery and prize money to match.
The language of flowers gave it the double meaning that still defines it: delicate pleasures and departure, often traced to Keats, who in 1817 described sweet peas on tip-toe for a flight, with wings of gentle flush over delicate white. Look at the bloom and the reading is obvious — the standard petal lifts like a sail, the wings spread, the whole thing is shaped like leaving.
It became the flower of the lovely thing that is ending. In American popular culture the name drifted into pure affection instead — Swee'Pea, the baby in the Popeye comics from 1933, and a run of pop songs that used the word the way you would use darling.
It is also the traditional first wedding anniversary flower and the April birth flower, two jobs that suit a bloom whose entire character is early, fragrant, and brief.
- Cut or buy in the morning. Sweet pea scent and vase life both peak before the day heats up. Afternoon stems are already halfway through their run.
- Use shallow water. Stems are short and soft, so two to three inches is plenty. Deep water rots them from the bottom and the whole bunch goes slimy in a day.
- Change the water every second day and re-trim a few millimetres off each stem. This is the single biggest factor in getting six days instead of three.
- Keep them cool and out of direct sun. A windowsill in July will finish them by lunchtime. Overnight in the coolest room in the house genuinely extends them.
- Keep them away from fruit. Ripening fruit gives off ethylene gas, and sweet peas are unusually sensitive to it. A bowl of bananas next to the vase will collapse them.
- Pull spent blooms as they brown rather than waiting. Sweet peas go over one flower at a time, and removing the tired ones keeps the bunch looking deliberate instead of dying.
- If you grow them, pick daily. Sweet peas flower to make seed, so the moment a pod sets, production slows. Relentless picking is what gives you blooms from June into August — the one plant where being greedy is also correct horticulture.
- Do not eat any part of it. Despite the pea family name, the seeds and pods of Lathyrus odoratus are toxic. Keep seed packets and pods away from children and pets.
📌 Quick Summary
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Pink — Blissful pleasure, tender early love, and thank you for a lovely time
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White — Sincere thanks, pure intention, and a blessing on someone's departure
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Red and Scarlet — Declared affection, courage, and pleasure taken openly
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Purple and Violet — Devotion with history behind it, dignity, and remembrance
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Lavender and Pale Blue — Serenity, nostalgia, and a goodbye made gently
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Maroon and Chocolate — Deep, settled devotion and the bittersweet end of something good
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Cream and Ivory — Quiet elegance, understated thanks, and warmth without display
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Bicolor, Striped, and Flaked — Mixed feelings held honestly, and a complicated goodbye
More Flower Meanings
The thing about sweet peas is the four days.
You can keep a supermarket chrysanthemum alive for three weeks and feel nothing about it. A jar of sweet peas gives you a long weekend of extraordinary scent and then it is finished.
That is why the Victorians handed them to people who were leaving, and why they still work for every bittersweet occasion on the list — anniversaries, farewells, last days, thank-yous for something that has already ended.
And the flower has quietly done the opposite of what it means. A monk's seeds from 1699 are still in catalogs. A bicolor from 1737 is fashionable at weddings again. Mrs Collier has outlived everyone who ever showed her.
Four days in the vase, three centuries in the ground.
If you have never smelled a real garden-grown one — not a cellophane bunch, a proper old purple Cupani off somebody's trellis — put it on the list for next June. It is one of the few flowers that is genuinely better than its reputation.
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