Perfect Pink Peonies

The garden is beginning to bloom...

I adore peonies.

They’re one of my favourite flowers.

(One of.

I have many, depending on the season and my mood.

Don’t ask me to choose one ultimate, it will likely result in total system meltdown 😂)

But right now, the first of the peonies are blooming in my garden, and I’m in rhapsodies.

The intense, magenta pink that looks almost fluorescent in bright sunshine, the velvet shimmer of the petals.

The way the buds seem so tiny and tight before erupting into such a profusion of petals that it seems impossible.

The way the colour gently fades to pastel as days, sometimes a week or more goes by, leaving the plant adorned with a multitude of shades dancing above a cushion of green leaves.

And the scent!

Don’t forget the scent!

Delicious, sweet and floral, suffusing the air on warmer days.

Or offering a heady intoxication if you get close and inhale deeply.

This plant is an inheritance from my grandmother’s garden. A portion hacked out of the ground before the house was sold following her passing, and hastily replanted in a hole dug in our own flowerbed.

We later discovered - thanks to the advice of the vastly more experienced than us Monty Don - that we’d done pretty much everything wrong in terms of when, how, and where we’d rehomed it. Peonies being somewhat fussy divas according to received gardening wisdom.

And yet.

The following spring, the large, juicy buds forced their way out of the earth, grew tall and strong, and blessed us with multiple blooms straightaway.

Call it luck.

Or magic.

But every year since, it has got better and better.

And after more than a decade in the wrong place, the wrong soil, the wrong planting depth, the wrong winter care, this year there are easily 30 buds or flowers in various stages of growth.

So it must be quite happy.

And it makes me infinitely happy.

This is the first of two peonies we have, the second a paler and even more blousy froth of huge flowers that will join the party in another couple of weeks.

The buds have already formed. The tiny, tight buds currently no bigger than blueberries, but the explosion of petals will eventually be almost as big as my head!

Isn’t that incredible?!

All that extravagant potential coming from something so small.

And assuming the weather is kind, a beauty that will last for weeks.

After which, I’ll go back to anticipating their reappearance next year.

Do you have peonies in your garden? Let me know in the comments - and especially let me know how you care for yours, in case I can do better with mine.