Eight years ago I introduced my blog with a photo of sweet peas from my garden. I’m growing those aromatic favorites again this year. I took the photo below right after I had cut almost all of the flowers I could reach for a bouquet. At this point the only other things in the vegetable beds are a few basil plants, but pole beans are going in, any minute now.
Back in 2009, I didn’t own an olive tree. Now I have two, and they are blooming right now.
I also didn’t have a feijoa (which Jo reminded me is another name for pineapple guava) until my recent re-landscaping. My big bush is blooming much more than during its first spring here. I think it only had one flower last year.
If the fruit tastes as fancy as those blooms look, we are in for a treat!
Gladsome Lights 
Simply beautiful!
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Never heard of Pineapple Guavas but I just watched an interesting little video about them. The flowers are truly amazing!!
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I notice a few sweet peas are curling up my foxglove out front and some others are lying low with little curly tendrils searching for a friend to pull themselves up upon. I have a hard time telling poppies and sweet peas where they should or should not grow. Yours are tremendous!
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So lovely Gretchen. I do love sweet peas. I always forget in the fall to plant them. I would love to have a pineapple Guava. You have such an interesting garden.
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I can’t remember ever seeing sweet peas in a garden. Now that I see yours, I’m quite taken with how closely they resemble the multitude of native pea species we have. (Of course that makes sense. They’re all in the same family!) We have a lovely yellow pea starting to bloom now, and the purple deer pea already is gone. Later, there will be others, including a beautiful salmon-colored one. I need to start looking — thanks for the lovely photos, and for the little push!
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We have a kind of wild sweet pea in California, maybe more than one kind. I saved some seeds one time and thought to try growing them in my garden…. I wonder what I did with them… Maybe at this point it is the kind of plant that I don’t have a place for, something that sprawls where it wills!
I never saw sweet peas in a garden until I grew them in my own. I had been inspired to try them by an article in Sunset Magazine showing an impressive display in a garden at University of California Santa Cruz. But for lack of sprawl and messiness, for maximization of straight stems for bouquets, nothing tops the way I saw them grown in Churchill’s Chartwell garden: https://gretchenjoanna.com/2014/05/20/seven-feet-and-sweet/ Each plant was trained to a stake so that there was no allowance for it growing naturally every which way.
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What a productive garden! I love those raised beds! 🙂
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