Ironically, it was in the depths of winter when I fell hopelessly in love with that most enchanting of summer cottage garden flowers: the common Sweet Pea. And I’m not talking about an admiring glance here, a satisfied sigh there. Rather, I’m talking about something bordering on downright obsession.

At first, having decided that I might quite like to grow sweet peas, I was amazed, and not a little bemused, to find so many related vlogs. Indeed, I spent the best part of January, February and March of last year holed up in my flat watching back to back YouTube videos on the subject matter: How to sow sweet peas. How to sow sweet peas for better germination. How to sow the best sweet peas. How to grow sweet peas in pots. How to tie-in your sweet peas. How to get the most out of your sweet peas. All practical stuff.

However, some videos – the purpose of which was not immediately apparent – were set to music and consisted of ten to fifteen minutes of slow, evocative pans of fully-established plants culminating in a sort of audio-visual ode to the sweet pea.

In the end, it was this latter type of video that took up most of my time.  For there, in the choreographed dance of the sweet pea I began to sense something close to magic in its rambling, unwieldy charm. I was struck by the way each new set of leaves having reached a certain height and a certain state of semi-openness looked, to me at least, like the pointy ears of the wild March Hare. And I was at a loss for three whole months as to which was my favourite bloom because I changed my mind on a daily basis. Some days I preferred the dusky pinks and pale lilacs, other days I was drawn to the deep purples and rich crimsons. And the tendrils! Oh my god, the tendrils!

And taper fingers catching at all things, To bind them all about with tiny rings.

As winter gave way to spring, I could hardly contain my excitement. By early April, every windowsill in my home housed a seed tray devoted to as many different varieties as I could lay my hands on. In preparation for Planting Out Day, I built eleven (yes, eleven!) tepees on my newly acquired allotment: two lots of five at the back of each of my two flower beds and a solitary tepee in the centre of my herb patch, just in front of my shed window.

Come early May, I was spending more time than was acceptable down on my knees at the allotment trying to convince myself that there’d been a growth spurt.  But after another few weeks had passed and I was still able to count only three sets of leaves something like a depression came over me. It didn’t make sense. We were almost in June. The sun was cracking the pavement. My poppies had been and gone, my delphiniums were six feet tall. Was this some sort of cosmic joke?

It was around this time in the allotment adventure that I wondered if there might be such a thing as a Sweet Pea Society and, if so, would it be at all possible for a member of said society to be drafted in, without delay, to provide emergency help and guidance?

Eventually help arrived – my plot neighbour caught me sitting cross-legged beside my flower border, head in hands. “You know, a watched pot never boils,” he said.

“Don’t you think they look a bit rubbish?” I enquired.

“Give over,” he said. “There’s no point mollycoddling ‘em. Just let the buggers grow.”

But I couldn’t just let them grow because it was so blatantly obvious from where I was sitting that the buggers weren’t growing. In fact, they’d hardly budged in a month. There was something wrong.

The briefest of research trips to my local nursery a few days later confirmed my worst fears. Indeed, alongside the newly sprung Cosmos seedlings was a positive jungle-like display of sweet peas. They weren’t just tumbling over the sides of the pots, they were trailing.  They had bushy side-shoots and a thickness about their stems that was not forthcoming in my own. On closer inspection, I saw that they even had tendrils, for god’s sake! I bought the lot, took them back to the plot, and started planting. There was no method involved; I just added the seedlings willy-nilly at the bottom of the beanpoles, firmed them in and gave them a good drenching.

And then I waited.

And waited…

And spoke kindly to them…

What happened next was the stuff of fairy tales. Within days the seedlings looked that bit taller; that bit bushier. A week later and they had climbed halfway up the beanpoles, and before the month was out I had my very first bloom: a deep purple. July saw the mother of all growth spurts – the foliage had grown to the top of the poles and was tumbling back down again. Each plant produced hundreds of blooms in every conceivable colour, and it wasn’t long before my sweet peas became the talk of the allotment. Everyone from the chairman to my mother had stopped to admire them, to breathe in their heady scent. On event days, when the gates were thrown open to the public, I had enough to give away to passers-by.

It was around late summer when the honeymoon period began to wear off. Sweet peas, I was to find out, are high maintenance. Oh yes, everyone’s quick to tell you that they’re so easy to grow and that the more you pick, the more they’ll keep on producing. But nobody tells you about the rate at which unpicked flowers turn into dreaded peapods, signalling the death-knell of your beloved blooms. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I spent the best part of the summer deadheading them. I kid you not, there were days when I’d leave mid-afternoon feeling satisfied that I’d spied and removed every last seedpod only to return in the evening for watering duty to find more!

By mid-August, I thought the stems had grown some sort of weird green fur, but then I realised they’d succumbed to a greenfly invasion. And when the first day of September rolled around, I had just enough blooms left to enter the end of the summer show, hosted by our allotment site. I was too disheartened to partake, but a fellow allotmenteer kindly entered them for me. They won first prize. ‘Never again,’ I thought, as I smiled for my photo…

‘Never again,’ I thought, as I began salvaging pods from the dead foliage. ‘Never in a million years,’ I thought, whilst extracting, trance-like, seeds from said pods. “Okay, two tepees tops,” I thought, whilst putting in an order for enough beanpoles to build a small hut.

Fast forward to Summer 2019 and, by rights, the allotment should be positively overrun with sweet peas. For in addition to the bog standard eleven tepees of annual sweet peas, this year has seen the introduction of a perennial variety on my plot. Alas, most likely due to a combination of feral wildlife and bad weather, things haven’t gone quite to plan. At least a third of my seedlings were pulled out of the ground by pesky magpies seemingly for the sheer fun of it – they don’t appear interested in eating them!  And the result? Too many unsightly gaps. There again, the heavy rain and lack of sun have no doubt played a part in the premature yellowing of the foliage and twisted flower stems.

The heady days of 2018 that I spent lovingly tending to my sweet peas seem like a distant memory now. The fact that I’m merely required to pick a vase full every few days but can otherwise get on with my life leaves me feeling, well, a bit redundant.  There’s not the same bond this time.  And if I’m honest, I feel a bit cheated. I’ve rushed away months of my life to be headlong into sweet pea season again. Yet, the rubbish British weather and the pests aside, I really know where I’ve gone wrong this time.

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As I sit here typing this and sipping my chamomile tea, there’s an idea edging its way into my awareness. What if it’s true that plants really do respond to the temperament of the gardener? What if all I have to do is pop along to the plot at first light and speak nicely to my sweet peas? You know, build a bond with them. Like last year.

Watch this space.

After a relatively short wait of six months on the allotment waiting list, I was finally handed the keys to my plot in April 2018. The plot needed quite a bit of work. For one thing, the central path running through it was covered by artificial grass, which was muddy and waterlogged making it nigh on impossible to lift. There were the rotting remains of last years’ growth and weeds with stubborn old roots that had formed sinewy networks several inches deep. Then there was the ghastly pink shed with its makeshift window of blue tarpaulin, not to mention the glass-less greenhouse. It’s little wonder, then, that I spent the first few days of my allotment adventure pottering about, semi-dazed at the enormity of the task I had taken on.

April, 2018

In fact, my allotment adventure began in the summer of 2017 when I was out walking one evening, heading towards the meadows close to where I live. Perhaps distracted by the ongoing Brexit shenanigans, I took a wrong turn and found myself on a narrow lane where, halfway down, I was stopped in my tracks by the sheer beauty of the sprawling allotment site. I must have been there for a good ten minutes, peering through the locked gates of this, well, secret garden! I’d never really had the urge to take up gardening, never so much as considered allotmenteering. So whatever happened to me in those ten minutes gawping at the gardens was powerful stuff, because I was not the same person after I left it. Indeed, I went straight home, fired up my laptop and set about emailing the site secretary to enquire about putting my name on the waiting list. Next I looked up Monty Don on YouTube. And the rest is history…

But I digress.

Bearing in mind that I was a complete novice when I took on my plot, that my gardening knowledge extended to keeping alive for a week a plant I took home on loan back in my primary school days, it was not obvious to me where one should begin. For the first few weeks I sort of muddled through, moving piles of debris from one part of the plot to another in an attempt to look busy, to look like I knew what I was doing. In fact, the first job of any real substance I undertook was to paint the shed. One evening, after work, with the sun a bit too close to setting than was ideal I turned up with paint pot and brush. “Are you here to do the night shift?” enquired my plot neighbour. I worked quickly taking great pleasure watching my shed turn from Bubble Gum Pink to Willow Green. That for me marked a turning point. At last, I could see the plot’s potential.

Over the next couple of weeks I tackled the raised beds, cleared away the weeds before laying new paths using woodchips delivered for free by a local tree surgeon. One of my fellow allotmenteers removed the waterlogged grass from my main path, and later, very kindly set to work with the site’s chairman to glaze my greenhouse. I will be forever grateful! Then, after raking the soil to as fine a tilth as my patience would permit, I began planting in earnest: potatoes, beets, spinach, Swiss chard, carrots, sweetcorn, squash, radish and lettuce. And voila! Come early May, a mere four weeks into my venture, my plot was totally transformed.

May, 2018

As the growing season was already underway I didn’t have time to plan where I was going to put things. I simply made a series of snap decisions and hoped for the best. However, when it came to my flower borders I had to be a bit more considered. Not only was it essential to make them look attractive for visiting members of the public and the local Lord Mayor, but it was also necessary to bear in mind that, at some point, the RHS judge would be casting his/her keen eyes over the plot.

Well, I say I was more considered in deciding on the design of the flower borders, but in truth, it was really only the back of the borders for which I had any semblance of a plan. In fact, I’d go as far as to say it was more of a vision than a plan – one that had begun germinating in my mind’s eye a few months before I was handed the keys to my plot. Sweet Peas. And lots of them. Tall, rambling sweet peas festooned with masses of fragrant blooms were to rise up at the back of the borders on either side of my main path so as to create a sort of splendid symmetry. I didn’t have a clue how I was going to bring said vision to fruition, mind you. (But that’s a whole other blog).

June, 2018

As for the remainder of my two flower borders, in the end I shoved in anything I could get hold of – gifted and shop-bought perennials were planted here and there without any real sense of their eventual spatial dimensions let alone their colour and texture. In retrospect, it was not my best move. But in the height of summer, when the result of my early haphazardness was laid bare for all to see, I set about plugging the gaps with established, colour- coordinated annuals. Job done. The overcrowded areas within the borders, however, where plants grappled with other plants for growing space, were a bit more problematic. And yes, by late summer, right when the RHS judge was doing the rounds and my sweet peas were no longer at their best (‘Whither is fled the visionary gleam?’), there was far more pink in the borders than I would have liked. But none of that mattered when, much to my surprise, I scooped the joint third prize for best flower border!

August, 2018

Of course, it’s not winning a prize that matters (although it does help). I had one of the best summers of my adult life on that plot last year. There were so many moments of tranquillity and contentment – just me, the birdsong and all this green magic. And if that wasn’t enough, there were a good few months throughout the summer when I could fill my fridge week in, week out with the freshest, best-tasting produce. Even my social life took off – the new community of like-minded souls came bearing gifts of homegrown goodies. There were event days when we threw open the gates to the masses and evenings when we came together to celebrate the special haven we all worked so hard to create. Friends and family would often descend on my plot for picnics, guided tours and, let’s be honest, a bag full of veggies. Some friends and family members liked the place so much that they threatened to move into my shed and set up house there. My mother was the only one who followed through. Indeed, she put her name down on the waiting list and is now the proud owner of her very own plot. Right behind mine! The allotment, then, became the unlikely place where I felt decidedly content.

Alas, all good things must come to an end, and come to an end it did. Rather abruptly. The autumn set in almost overnight bringing with it the mammoth task of chopping down and composting all of the decaying crops. To make matters worse, following my unsuccessful attempt to light a small bonfire (how hard can it be?) I spent the best part of a weekend ferrying binbags of garden waste back and forth to the local tip. It was upsetting to see everything die back and stripped bare. Wooden beds on soil and concrete. Actually, it wasn’t quite so grim as I made a point of planting a few winter greens, perhaps in a desperate bid to prolong the growing season and fend off the winter blues.

October 2018

November 2018

In the end, there just wasn’t the time for the melancholy to set in as the plot was coming back to life in December – giving me more things to worry about. I mean, is it normal for the spring bulbs to be putting up shoots before we’ve even got Christmas out of the way? Is it natural for the rhubarb crown to be greening in the ground on New Years’ Day? You see, this is why we need the BBC to airGardener’s World all year round!

December 2018

,Fast forward to April 2019 and the second season of my allotment adventure is well and truly underway. I no longer have to scrutinise the ground for signs of life as my plot is positively teeming with it. I’m running out of room in the greenhouse, and the plants in the cold frame are getting so big they’re pushing up the lid. My fellow plotters are back, too – heads down, backsides in the air. It’s all go.

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It’s a funny thing this allotment malarkey. I’ve heard it said that when it gets a hold of you, there’s no going back. Sometimes, when I’m last out, I make a point of taking a minute to look through the gates as I’m locking up. There’s just me, the sunset and the birdsong. In those moments I’m reminded all over again of the evening when I first stumbled across the beautiful secret garden.