Sweet Pea Became Popular Annual for the Garden in Late Nineteenth Century

The sweet pea has long been a garden favorite.

We owe its popularity to the seed trade from the late nineteenth century.

James Vick (1818-1882), seed merchant from Rochester, New York, was reponsible for putting the sweet pea into the hands of many gardeners.

Peggy Cornett Newcomb wrote in her book Popular Annuals of Eastern North America 1865-1914, “James Vick took a special interest in sweet peas and kept abreast of all the new introductions from England.”

The seed merchants introduced newer varieties of many flowers. They made the sweet pea a popular choice for gardeners.

Cornett Newcomb said that Vick “was probably one of the first to introduce Blue Hybrid and Scarlet Invincible into the American trade.”

Sweet Pea Chromo

Vick included a beatiful choromolithograph of the sweet pea in his magazine Vick’s Illustrated Monthly of 1882.

University of Rochester Special Collections librarian Karl Kabelac wrote an article called “Ninetheenth-Century Rochester Fruit and Flower Plates” in the University of Rochester Library Bulletin.

Kabelac writes about William Karle and Anton Rahn who owned a Rochester litographic company called Karle and Co. in the late 1880s.

In 1880 Karle and Co. provided a lithograph of the sweet pea for Vick’s seed catalog called Vick’s Floral Guide. [below]

The image remains to this day a splendid manifestation of the value and importance of the sweet pea.

Cornett Newcomb writes about sweet pea varieties of the time. She says, “Prominent annuals of the 1880s recognized by horticultural societies include the Eckford and Laxton Sweet Pea.”

In his book The Flower and Vegetable Garden (1875) Vick wrote, “The Flowering Peas are among the most useful and beautiful of all the hardy annuals.”

Victorians Loved the Sweet Pea

Horticulturist and garden historian Barbara Medera writes a wonderful garden history blog called Harvesting History, founded in 2016.

Barbara once gave a talk about Victorian gardening at the Boston and Flower Garden Show.

In the talk she said, “If there is a flower of the Victorian period, it would have to the sweet pea.”