When we bought our house in Arcadia 34 years ago I had fallen in love with the apple tree and day lilies growing in the backyard. I didn’t notice the deep green leaves surrounded by weeds growing next to the shed which spring revealed to be a fragrant, light pink peony.
Today the apple tree is gone, blown over in a storm, and the lilies struggle to bloom in the deepening shade of trees 30 years older but that little patch of dark green has never failed in its beautiful but short lived bloom every spring.
Every year I say I am going to cut the blooms and enjoy them indoors before the rain knocks them down…but every year I wait just a little too long and the petals are scattered everywhere.
Every year I also said I was going to plant more peonies…but every year I forgot until it was too late. This year one chilly, drizzly day in May, Mr O and I went to Peony’s Envy, a New Jersey peony garden and nursery which I heard of at a winter garden show exhibit.
The name alone made me smile but the photos of their flowers made the smile bigger. We wandered the wet grounds and took photos of soggy peonies and bought some plants.
I hope my new plants thrive as well in my backyard as my inherited plant has .
With their beauty and hardiness it is no wonder that so many photographs are taken of peonies…and so many poems written with them in mind. I read this on The Writer’s Almanac long ago…
Peonies
Grandma called them pineys, and I didn't know why.
They smelled so good, the full lush petals
crowded thick, the whole flower heavy on its stem,
the leaves dark and rich and green as shade in Chatauqua Woods
where each spring I hunted for violets. What could there be
to pine for on this earth? Now I think maybe it was Missouri
she missed, and maybe that was what somebody she knew
called peonies there, before she traveled to Ohio,
a sixteen-year-old bride whose children came on as fast
as field crops and housework. Her flowers saved her,
the way they came up year after year and with only a bit of care
lived tender and pretty, each kind surprising,
keeping its own sweet secret: lily-of-the-valley, iris,
the feathery-leaved cosmos, lilacs in their white and purple curls,
flamboyant sweet peas and zinnias, the bright four o'clocks
and delphinium, blue as her eyes, and the soft peony flowers
edged deep pink. In her next life I want my grandmother
to walk slowly through the gardens in England and Kyoto.
I want to be there when she recognizes the flowers
"Peonies" by Jeanne Lohmann, from Calls from a Lighted House. © Fithian Press, 2007
…and the second I recently discovered on the beautiful blog third-storey window and fell deeply in love with it.
Peonies at Dusk
White peonies blooming along the porch
send out light
while the rest of the yard grows dim.
Outrageous flowers as big as human
heads! They’re staggered
by their own luxuriance: I had
to prop them up with stakes and twine.
The moist air intensifies the scent,
and the moon moves around the barn
to find out what it’s coming from.
In the darkening June evening
I draw a blossom near, and bending close
search it as a woman searches
a loved one’s face.
Kenyon, Jane. “Peonies at Dusk” from Otherwise: New & Selected Poems (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1996), p.207.
All photos are of flowers from my old, inherited peony plant either this year or last.
