We’re looking forward to enjoying the first crop of peas from the garden but checking on their progress  made me recall a story about a pea-related battle   – well OK – a pea-related skirmish. This involved some leading nurserymen and gardeners of Victorian Britain and showed that even the sedate and normally polite world of horticulture could be quite  cut-throat and not always entirely ethical, when reputation and presumably money was involved.

But a battle over peas? I can hear you thinking surely thats not credible?  So please don’t laugh too loudly when I tell you the battle was about the Telegraph and the Telephone,  both new varieties of pea.

 

 

Only those few really long-established readers will know that I’ve written before  about the history of peas [well somebody had to!] and I’ve written too about Carter’s who were in the late 19th and early 20th centuries  one of the world’s leading seed companies.

Alongside their rivals such as Suttons, Carter’s were always on the look out for new varieties of flowers, fruit and vegetables, especially vegetables.  There was huge commercial value in being able to provide gardeners with varieties that had  different cropping times, especially early and late , as well as different growths patterns – ie dwarf/climbers, produce sizes – think cherry or beef tomatoes, baby courgettes/marrows  and so on.

But can you believe this applied to peas too?

Carters grew much of their seed on their own farms, and set up breeding programmes to continually improve their offer.  Bigger, better, earlier, later, taller, shorter, and even tastier varieties were always on their minds.  Some crops such as asparagus had high value because of their  cash value on the market, while others had high value because of the sheer bulk of the orders that were placed by professional and amateur growers.  Peas were amongst those  the top of that volume  list because they were  a significantly important commercial product as well as popular on the domestic market.

You can get a sense of the scale of the operation from the fact that they devoted 70 acres of their farmland for growing beans of all kinds for seed, 96 acres  for growing cabbages for seed , but no less than  814 acres for peas. By 1888 they  gave over 2 double spreads in their catalogue to their simple text listing of available pea seeds. By 1913 that had stretched to nearly 30 pages. Admittedly each page carried one or two photos but even so, the range was enormous and shows how gardeners were able to grow peas virtually all year round.

Now you might think a pea is a pea is a pea – thats certainly how I felt when I started this post. Having looked at dozens and dozens of  seed catalogues the illustrations of named varieties still look pretty much the same to me. It doesn’t help that they are all either black and white engravings or photographs but despite that  others with better eyesight and knowledge than must have been able to tell them apart!

The range of varieties  enabled gardeners to have peas virtually all year round.  Carter’s Forcing Pea, for example,  could be sown under glass in the winter  “when the vinery [is] doing practically nothing” and could be followed by many varieties of “earliest”, “second early”, “main-crop”, “later main-crop”, and “late sorts” ending with Carter’s Michaelmas “which quite oversteps the boundary hitherto set by times and seasons.”  All their assertions were, of course, backed by fulsome references from head gardeners of the great and good.

So it was nothing out of the ordinary when in 1878 James Carter & Co introduced a new pea variety, Telephone, that they claimed was a single selection from another newish variety Telegraph. [ie they had selected the pods from one plant and used them as the basis for the creation of a new variety].  Telephone was awarded a First Class Certificate by the RHS in 1879 and, as a result, was heavily promoted by the company. They even began offering cash prizes for outstanding samples of it displayed by amateur growers at horticultural shows.

Carters  and their rivals invested heavily in hybridising and trialling new varieties but, like many horticultural companies today, they were also interested in acquiring new varieties bred by independent gardeners or growers and Telegraph had been one of these.

Mr Igguldon  of Orsett Hall in Essex also sent in samples of seed  of both sorts, pointing out that the contrast between them was very marked.  Culverwell’s Telegraph had “among other remarkable characteristics… that of producing some seed nearly round and green, and the others very wrinkled and a much lighter colour.”  He concluded that ” excellent as Culverwell’s Telegraph is, it is possible by careful selection, to still further improve it, which I understand Messrs Carter claimed to have done.” After all he said  “if they are synonymous how came the certificate of the Royal Horticultural Society to be awarded to Telephone?”

Culverwell now issued a challenge suggesting that Carters “send the wrinkled peas which they have named Telephone to Mr Barron of the Royal Horticultural Gardens, and I will send some of the  original stock  of Telegraph.  The difference then, if any, can be pointed out there.”  He added that he has been hybridising other peas and had a lot of experience with introducing new varieties to the public

Clearly the subject had stirred a lot of emotions and on 15th February 1879 the editors closed the correspondence because none of the letters threw additional light on any point at issue.   However they added “one thing is clearly established i.e. that what Messrs Carter and Co are sending out as Telephone is the most wrinkled seed selected from Telegraph; whether there will be proved to be any great difference between this and the true stock of Telegraph remains to be seen.”

Don’t hold your breath.

In August 1879 Gardeners’ Chronicle reported back on the experiments  at the Royal Horticultural Society’s garden in Chiswick.  Seeds of Telegraph,  and Telephone supplied by Carters and two others  potential new strains labelled  respectively number four and new blue also from  Carters were sown side-by-side.  “When we saw them a few days ago it was impossible to distinguish any difference whatever between them.  …it is impossible to come to any other conclusion than that they are one and the same thing, notwithstanding the selection of the wrinkled from the round seeds … the general opinion has been they were all alike,…

To Mr Culverwell belongs the credit of raising and sending out Telegraph – an undoubtedly fine Pea, and it is to be hoped we shall hear no more of the name Telephone.”

With that the editor closed the correspondence.

Far from ending the dispute this seemed merely to spark off more discussion,   With comments coming in from gardeners on both sides, some saying there was no difference and others  they had “proved to be perfectly distinct.”  At Woodbridge  in Suffolk for example “although the pods were, to all appearances, exactly alike, the Peas in the samples of those named Telegraph were, of quite a green cast, and the Telephone white, or the colour of Veitch’s”  Mr Iggulden  chipped in again too saying he had made three sowings of each side by side and the two were clearly distinct both in appearance and when cooked. He expressed surprise at the editors verdict.

At the same time, believe it or not, both Culverwell and Carter were continuing to introduce yet more new varieties, often added a note explaining how they had produced them – see for example Carter’s 1898 catalogue.

Meanwhile “a reader of long standing ”   told Gardeners Chronicle they had decided to have”a quiet look into the kitchen garden at Thorpe Perrow, principally to see Mr. Culverwell’s Peas.” There were in addition to Culverwell’s Prolific Marrow and Telegraph…the new Pea… Culverwell’s Giant Marrow.”  Gardeners Chronicle reported on this and Carter’s new introduction early in 1880: Stratagem. This was “a dwarf wrinkled blue marrow …,an extraordinarily large-podded Pea, excellent for autumn use and splendid for exhibition purposes. [and] will, no doubt, be largely grown for market purposes. Big Peas being the fashion.”

Culverwell must have decided to abandon hope of getting a better deal from Carter’s and in 1880 his Giant Marrow pea – “the King of all my New Peas” –  was being marketed by Charles Sharpe a seedsman from Sleaford in Lincolnshire.

But Culverwell still wasn’t happy and continued to maintain that Carter’s had effectively stolen his work although  there was no concept of intellectual property at this time.  For Culverwell, it was above all his reputation as a breeder that was at stake.   He maintained too that it was not just Telephone which came from his Telegraph strain but Carter’s other new introductions  Stratagem and Pride of the Market: “I obtained a packet of Stratagem Pea; this packet produced the green and white Peas, and were identical with dwarf Peas selected from Telegraph. When the four varieties are well grown, the pods can hardly be separated.” [GC 26th August 1882] 

In this Culverwell was quite right BUT what neither he nor Carter’s understood was WHY.

 

Carter’s  told a researcher  a decade or more later that they  found Telegraph  “so variable that without further crossing they produced from it, by simple selection, the four races now known as Telephone, Stratagem, Pride of the Market, and Duke of Albany. ”

The researcher was Raphael  Weldon, a member of the Royal Society & a biologist with a great interest in statistics and the new science of genetics

 

In 1902 Weldon wrote a paper  “Mendel’s Laws of Alternative Inheritance in Peas“. Gregor Mendel  now widely acclaimed as the founder of the modern science of genetics conducted a series of experiments in the 1850s and 1860s which  showed that crossbreeding of animals and plants could  be used to develop desirable traits,  Conveniently Mendel’s subject matter for these experiments were pea plants, and he used them to test the how various  characteristics  such as height, and the shape and colour of flowers, seeds and pods were handed down from generation to generation of plants, and that this was predictable.   His work was almost forgotten until the end of the 19thc when others repeated his experiments and challenged his findings.

Working at the same time as Mendel Thomas Laxton [1830-93] came to different conclusions.

Laxton was  a highly successful nurseryman and a renowned plant hybridiser [including of peas] who collaborated and corresponded with Charles  Darwin.  In 1866 Laxton published a very short note:  “Observations on the varieties effected by crossing in the colour and character of the seed of peas,” in which  he argued that even after 3 or 4 generations   seeds often reverted  “partly to the colour and character of its ancestors of the first generation, partly partaking of the various intermediate colours and characters, and partly sporting quite away from any of its ancestry.”

In other words breeders should  not expect new varieties, especially those formed through hybridisation, to quickly settle down into a uniform character. Instead that  required “careful and continuous selection” to fix the changes introduced by  hybridisation into new and stable varieties.

Weldon then used the four varieties Carters derived from Telegraph as his subjects to test the two theories and concluded that Laxton was right.  He showed that “Telegraph produced seeds of various colours at the time of its origin, and now, more than five-and-twenty years after its introduction, it does so still…. Its offspring. many generations removed from their common hybrid ancestor are “variable.”

So Culverwell, Carters and their various proponents were all both right and wrong. They just didn’t understand genetics.  The characteristics of recently hybridised peas like Telegraph and Telephone and their various offspring. were not fixed and immutable.  Variability was the name of the game for many generations and so all these pea skirmishes were fought on false premises.

Believe it or Telephone is still available. Now described as a heritage variety  it is marketed by Suttons who have inherited the Carter’s name, and also by Thompson and Morgan – using exactly the same advertising blurb, which suggest they are both buying in from a third party supplier.

There were problems tracking down Telegraph because internet searches got confused with the newspaper of the same name BUT in a wonderful twist on which to end the post I checked with AI.   I got these two responses:  firstly “Telegraph (or “Telephone“) pea seeds are a classic 1880s heirloom climbing variety ” and secondly the “Telegraph Pea” (more commonly known as the Tall Telephone or Alderman pea) is a classic heirloom climbing pea… it has been a favourite among gardeners since the 1880s.”  Difficult to credit since Alderman is another  variety introduced by Carters but not until 1893.

All I can assume is that AI is as confused as Culverwell, Carter’s and all those Victorian gardeners …and me… and can’t tell its Telegraph from its Telephone!