If that rings true, then you’re not alone. Having done a little google digging, there’s a nod to being careful about your manners but the real meaning of either the P or the Q is lost in the mists of time.

The reason the little saying sprang to mind? I wanted to explore some nature knowledge I picked up this week all about legumes. Basically, I was hoping to share what was in my mind and provoke some hopefully answerable questions about the humble pea.

Not so humble as it happens, the pea family is the third biggest family of land plants on the planet with over 19,000 species. You’ll find peas in the wild and they’re cultivated in gardens because they’re so pretty and rather popular with our pollinators. Peas self-pollinate though so share their nectar for free. As it’s such a big family, peas are divided into lots of tribes, including the clover tribe and the bean tribe. I didn’t know that a bean could be a pea. I also didn’t know that peas can be trees. That blew my mind.

I’m on about Laburnum trees also known as golden rain because of the spectacular yellow pea flowers that hang down from the branches in late spring. It’s definitely not the kind of pea you want to eat though, Laburnum and quite a few other peas can be undigestable to non-pollinators. So perhaps that’s why you need to mind them.

Of course, same as any family, peas come in all shapes and sizes. Take a look at a head of clover, for example and you’ll see a cluster of hundreds of teeny tiny pea flowers. Vetch is also a clover pea but has much larger single pea flowers. Common Bird’s-foot-trefoil is another good one to look out for. This pea flowers between May and September and is occasionally known as ‘eggs and bacon’ or ‘hens and chickens’ because of its yellow and burnt orange colouring. But don’t be fooled by the foody name though, you need to be wary as parts of it are poisonous too.

Pea flowers, whatever the size, have three petals known as a banner, wings and the keel, which sounds to me more like something you might find on a boat or a plane not a flower. It gets even more complicated as a banner is a single petal that looks like two fused together. While the keel is actually two petals, joined up as one. At least the ‘wings’ are what you might expect, found either side of the banner. As pea flowers mature they form tiny pea-like pods, another distinctive trait of the family.

Thinking about the lovely world of legumes has actually got me asking more questions than I can answer, so perhaps I’ll carry on minding my peas and continue to ask leguminous questions.