![]() ![]() The body of this booklet was a catalog of all the varieties and cultivars- English, American, and other nationalities- in existence prior to that date. Only ten years after the California sweet pea epoch started, Morse’s son, Lester, published Field Notes on Sweet Peas (1917). In California the names of Ferry, Morse, and Burpee are the most prominent, but, at one time, many also knew of the Zvolanek family, William and Frank Cuthbertson (who did the crosses for Morse), and Denholm Seeds. After 1930, the merged firm of Ferry-Morse Seeds occupied land near San Juan Bautista in San Benito County. CC Morse worked in San Francisco, but grew his seed in Santa Clara County. As far back as the 1890s, English growers were sending the seeds of their new cultivars to California to be “bulked up.” DM Ferry, from Detroit, had a ranch in Salinas, in Monterey County. Other seed growers followed soon after.Īlthough Lompoc came to be known as the sweet pea “capital,” the flowers were also cultivated on a large scale in other California agricultural valleys. Some of his seed had been developed by the Reverend Lewis Routzahn in the late 1880s, working at the ranch of his father-in-law, TH McClure. Sweet peas were one of his principal crops. Within two years W Atlee Burpee of Philadelphia set up shop in Lompoc. Rennie planted sweet peas on half an acre of his ranch, which is now part of Lompoc’s town center. The region’s rich soil and benign climate were ideal for growing the flowers wind and fog from the Pacific Ocean cooled the worst of the summer heat. A visitor asked a Lompoc farmer, Robert Rennie, to grow them. This year is a centennial of sorts: in 1907, sweet peas were first grown in California’s Central Coast valleys on an agricultural scale. Photograph courtesy Lompoc Valley and Horticultural Society ![]() W Atlee Burpee ( l) and Henry Eckford ( r), two early sweet pea breeders, pictured in Burpee’s 1929 Garden Annual. ![]()
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