Sweet scent is King – the story of Kings Sweet Peas

Kings seeds have kindly given us 50 packets of Sweet Pea seeds to give away. The first 50 people that come to our reception desk and give us their details to go on to Kings mail-list will be given a packet to take home.

 Kings Seeds was founded by Ernest William King in 1888, in Coggeshall, Essex.  At the time, his grandfather’s firm, J K King, was Britain’s biggest seed company, but Ernest was forced to set up a rival firm at just 18 years old, having been refused work at J K King by jealous half-brothers.

Ernest, known as “EW”, prided himself on supplying the purest, cleanest seed stock available.  Every possible care was taken to ‘rogue out’ any typical plants that had not ‘come true’ by the firm’s own experts, and EW ensured the best machinery was used to clean and dress the seed.  He quickly built a reputation for quality product and personal customer service.

When EW died in 1930, the company passed to his two godsons and five key employees, mostly board directors, who had become shareholders. These shares have largely remained with those families through the generations.  Peter Miller is a grandson of George Cuckow, one of the original directors.  Like most other recipient shareholders, Peter has worked for the company – in his case, for more than 50 years – and is now King’s Purchase Manager.

The company is perhaps best known for sweet pea seeds.  EW was passionate about them, and engaged sweet pea expert George Burt to develop and augment King’s sweet pea selections.  George named a sweet pea after each of his four daughters, Mavis, Doris, Gladys and Iris.  It offered more than 100 sweet pea cultivars, and developed specialist processing and seed-counting equipment.  In his day EW became known as ‘King of Sweet Peas’ and wore a button-hole of the firm’s blooms at many London shows and seed auctions.  Today, more than 120 cultivars are listed, with Spencer and High Scent sweet pea mixes the most popular.  Stock sweet pea seed is still grown at home in Essex, but is often despatched abroad for ‘bulking up’.

Mixed sweet pea seed is sown directly into outlying fields each November, and reliably produces clouds of blooms in early summer.  Ripened seed is gathered using a combine harvester.  Named cultivars are initially grown under glass, five to each 7.5cm (3in) pot, sown in November.  In spring, after 10-14 days hardening off, they are planted out against supports, each individually labelled.  When seed pods of these plants are ripe, they are hand-picked into apron pockets or buckets.

The seed is then threshed and cleaned, today largely by machine, but smaller quantities may be traditionally processed – after drying in hessian sacks, the now brittle pods are bashed with wooden batons to release the seed.  This mixed matter then passes through a thresher which separates seed from chaff, and any remaining waste is blown away with a winnower.  The seed is sieved, and then picked over by hand to remove any split or small seed.

Large quantities of seed for the commercial market were once measured out in wooden, barrel-like containers, smaller ‘pecks’ and larger ‘bushels’.  Home gardener’s seed, in small amounts, was measured with tiny bespoke spoons, the smallest for begonia seed, larger spoons for beetroot.  Trade in sweet peas merited an additional seed sorter. Rather like a miniature pinball machine, slots were made to accommodate the appropriate number of seeds per packet, which were pushed by springs into waiting envelopes.  Today Kings measures all seed automatically by volume.

For our Garden Centre range we have selected 40 outstanding varieties chosen for their range of colour, fragrance and reliability for the home market.