It was a Sicilian monk, Friar Cupani, who in 1695 first noted the existence of a cultivated variety of sweet pea, with flowers half as large again as those of the wild Lathyrus odoratus, in the monastery garden at Palermo. When, four years later, he sent it to Dr Robert Uvedale, a teacher and collector of exotic plants in Enfield, Middlesex, he could not possibly have imagined the effect on the flower-growing world of his botanical curiosity.
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