May must, in my opinion, be the best month of the year in the garden. Fed by the winter rains, the plants are flourishing, the blowsy borders are at their peak and blooms are bursting everywhere. Perennials have regained their height. Early spring sown annuals have begun to flower. The roses are fresh and full but nothing beats the peonies. May is their moment.
Amidst the bulbs in March, their red and bronze nubs of new leaves pushing through the soil, add another layer of colour to the spring garden. In April their new green mounds add structure in the border, creating a foil for tulips. And then, suddenly, like a firework display reaching a crescendo, the peony flowers explode into colour.
Huge heads of intense reds or subtly blushing pinks, purest white or deepest crimson are held on long stems, easily bowed by rain-heavy petals. By mid-June, the flowers are over. But what a show!
Sarah Beattie
Care and support
Some gardeners feel that peonies are not worth the trouble. There are lots of myths about how difficult they are and how you cannot move them or they will never flower again, complaining that they take up too much space for too short a flowering season.
Peonies are so beautiful that I believe their so-called fussiness should be taken into account – most plants have some sort of special requirements we accommodate.
Most peonies do need support. I use the strong, whippy prunings from fruit trees, willow, hazel or cornus, to create a domed cage-like structure above the emerging leaves in the spring. The leaves grow through it and the stems are then supported without the need to tie up the big flowerheads.
You can buy metal or plastic grids which work in the same way but you must put them in position before the leaves start shooting. If you are too late, use the metal linking stakes or make your own by buying reinforcing rods from a DIY store.
Monty Don, on BBC’s Gardener’s World, showed how to bend them into shape around a tree trunk and then bend the “legs” up. Look for the instructional video online. I have made dozens of these over the years, in different heights and shapes. They last indefinitely and are very cheap to create.
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Peony varieties
There are three sorts of peony: the herbaceous, the tree and the intersectional (Itoh). The herbaceous peony disappears over winter. The leaves die back and virtually nothing is seen above ground.
These sort of peonies are the cheapest to grow. I have a great many as I bought a lot of bare roots for €2.50 each from a discount supermarket when planning for a family wedding. Covid cancelled the celebrations but the flowers fill the garden every year.
These bare roots are planted in late autumn. Take care to ensure they are not planted too deep – 4cm is all. You can start them off in pots if you prefer.
When transplanting peonies, make sure you put them back into the ground at precisely the same level – if too deep they will take a long time to re-establish and won’t flower until they do. If you do it correctly, they’ll flower again the next year.
Flowers with ‘superpowers’
Peonies make really excellent flowers for weddings. Not only are they magnificent in size, shape and form, many are scented with a glorious perfume.
Their superpower for those amateurs growing for family weddings is that you can pick the nearly open buds on long stems and then hold them for up to six weeks, rolled in newspaper, in the fridge drawer.
When you need them, trim off the bottom 5cm of the stem and pull off any damaged leaves. Put them in tepid water with flower food and they will open in a day or so. All fraught timing headaches can be avoided!
Tree peonies create woody branches which persist over winter – they don’t disappear. They are larger plants generally and have more dissected leaves. When the flowers are over, the shape and structure of the tree peony still adds interest to the border.
Tree peonies are usually bought as a potted plant and are therefore more expensive than the bare root herbaceous ones but, if you are patient, P. delavayi can be easily grown from seed. Named after Abbé Delavay, a French Jesuit missionary in China who collected it for the British Royal Horticultural Society, P. delavayi is fairly small, flowered in deep red-maroon or yellow (P. delavayi lutea).
The intersectional peonies are a hybrid of herbaceous and tree peonies. Also called Itoh after Toichi Itoh who first bred them in the 1940s in his native Japan, these are the priciest peonies to buy.
Beautiful blooms
They are probably the most expensive plant in my garden, apart from a tree, but they don’t need staking and are very long-lived.
They produce masses of flowers although as mine is still new, I can’t yet confirm it.
One of my favourite peonies was free. I rescued it with a teaspoon, scooping a small two leaved seedling out of a lawn at a friend’s house. It has taken a decade or so but that seedling has grown into a handsome white flowered peony with merest flush of pink at the base of its many petals.
It has a fabulous scent and the deepest green contrasting leaves. It’s earned its place and who cares if it only flowers once a year when it’s as beautiful as that?
