by guest blogger Karin Kirk
Early August brings Bozeman’s biggest community celebration, the Sweet Pea Festival of the Arts. It’s three days of music, dance, arts vendors and general outdoor liveliness in a lovely park setting. It’s called the Sweet Pea Festival because it’s centered around the beautiful, fragrant and ephemeral sweet pea flowers which seem to peak around this time of year. Sweet peas are a springtime flower in most places, but here springtime means snow so sweet peas don’t really get going until summer. However sweet peas don’t like heat either, so there seems to be some magical window of not too hot yet not too cold during which sweet peas prosper.
A fairly minor part of the Sweet Pea Festival is the sweet pea flower show. Upon moving here and starting our gardens I realized it was my civic duty to grow sweet peas so I set up teepee stakes and grew them in several colors. When the weekend of the flower show competition arrived, I cut the choicest stems and lovingly delivered them to the flower show tent. When I arrived, proudly bearing my flowers, the women checking in the entries looked at my tiny stems and asked in a sympathetic tone, “Is this your first time?” Hmm, was it that obvious? She showed me the real contenders, tall stems with 5 or 6 lavishly ruffled flowers in exotic colors. My flowers did look rather “quaint” in comparison, with just 2 flowers per stem.
I’m a determined gardener, so I took that early lesson to heart and spent the next 9 years trying to grow reasonable sweet pea flowers. I knew I would never have the dedication to produce champion blooms, but at least I’d like to be mid-pack rather than an obvious first-timer. I ordered seeds from several catalogs, I constructed various trellis structures. I grew them in different parts of the yard, searching for that magical zone where they would flourish. All the while, I saw nicer sweet peas casually growing at the gas station, on campus and at everyone else’s house. Worst of all, I endured condescending advice from gardeners about how easy it was to produce huge stems.
Then last year I had a breakthrough. By late June I had enormous sweet pea flowers. Long stems, vibrant flowers, the works. I cut huge bouquets and had enough to share with friends. If they were this good in June, just imagine how great they’d be by August! Well when the weekend arrived, my sweet peas had completely exhausted themselves. I couldn’t even find two decent stems to enter into the contest. Dang it.
This year I tried again, as always. I ordered up more seeds, kept better track of each variety and the timing of their flowers, and did my usual fawning over their progress throughout our fitful spring weather.
Sure enough, by early August I had some promising stems with 4 flowers per stem – a record for me. I crossed my fingers and planned to show up at the flower show again. I brought my finest stems to the flower show tent and did not get scoffed at. A good start. After I entered my stems I inspected the other entries and did not see many others with 4 flowers per stem. Most had shorter stems than mine. Hmm. I tried to tell myself that it didn’t matter how I did, it was just good to be mid-pack which was my original goal. I tried hard to convince myself that I didn’t need to come back for the ribbons to see how I did. Shockingly, Dave didn’t believe a word of my compelling rhetoric.
OK, so I was dying to go back and see the results. After my initial embarrassment and years of trying the suspense had mounted. Sure enough, my sweet pea stem was adorned with a blue ribbon! Not just mid-pack, mind you! I will be quick to point out that there were Grand Champion flowers that were better than mine, but I had won the single stem competition with a spike of bright pink flowers.
At last, my civic duty to produce sweet peas has been met! And yes, I will grudgingly admit that the competitive side of me is satisfied too.
