The sign of the peony

Bramble & Briar #115

Peony ‘Coral Charm’, about half way through her colour shifting display

The peony waves a flag in the garden at the end of May. I think most of us think it’s calling for attention; flowers, after all, are colossal show offs, and few more so than the peony. Of course, that’s kind of the point of a flower and we’re more than happy to comply, and the peony shows off so very well. But I’m not sure that showing off is all that the peony is doing. I think it’s signalling something – a kind of floral semaphore to draw notice to something more than the contents of its nectaries, or the pollen dusting its anthers. It’s a call that’s easy to overlook, to lose in the general noise of the season as we revel in the wonder of the garden getting truly into its floral stride, and suffer ourselves to sink into the intoxication not only of peonies, but roses, clematis, ox-eye daisies, poppies and pink elderflower.

Of course, the flowering of every plant in the garden is its own milestone, though to some of these events we assign more importance than others. Snowdrops and hellebores signposting the end of winter, chrysanthemums ringing out summer, and in between the whole gorgeous tide of blossom that ebbs and flows and never really stills. Even at its lowest point there’s the ivy, and mahonia. But sit for a while in the company of the peony, long enough to learn the art of looking beyond the immediate show. Somehow, or else it seems to me at least, this is one of the saddest and most poignant markers in the horticultural caldender, at once so longed for and so fleeting and, in terms of the gardening year, so redolent (to pinch some Churchillian rhetoric) of the end of the beginning, if not quite the beginning of the end. It feels like we’re just getting going, as though the weather is learning to shake off the lingering backward pull of winter and, with warm nights still some weeks away, we’ve everything to look forward to. Except, in these few short weeks, we’ve seen so much we’ve waited for come and go to seed: crocus, daffodil, tulip, all but the latest of the alliums. And of course, the peony. The light starts to change, now, too – the sun clambering higher into the sky and we’ve less than a month left to the longest day. Gosh darn it, does the garden already think it’s done? Looking around me today, not yet. Plenty of seed about, but plenty in bud, and also plenty of that bright, fresh green so characteristic of May, without the thirsty, yellow tone that creeps in with July and begins to paint in broad brushstrokes, with silver, straw, and biscuit tones. There’s a plumpness about the plants just now – give me a few days, a week at the most, and I’ll be crying out for a pause button to stop the year right there, to sit in peak, resplendent floof¹.

Back to the peonies, and specifically, the ones we have here.