A gloriously sunny late-May, with record temperatures, has turned into something of a damp squib with June’s arrival. Not that I’m complaining, for 30C in May and no rain means one thing – watering, more watering and yet more watering. The roses and peonies haven’t minded the hot, dry weather one bit, but everything’s flowered three weeks earlier and gone over at rapid speed. Climate change has moved everything forward and the plants I wrote about for September flower, some thirty years ago, are usually out by August these days
Many of my peonies come in shades of pink and most of them are heritage French varieties raised in the mid-19th century. They are all named forms of a Chinese species, Paeonia lactiflora, and they have good foliage and several buds per stem. They were grown as a cash crop historically and the bunched-up flowers went up to Paris via the newly invented steam train. Pastel peonies were a French speciality and they were fragrant, with names straight out of the French telephone directory. Fragrant double flowers were in demand in the grand mansions lining the boulevards. They were picked at the marshmallow stage, just as the buds opened.
Martin Page’s excellent book, The Gardener’s Peony, explains their pass the parcel French history. He tells us that Jacques Calot, who died in 1875, acquired a collection of peonies from an aristocrat named Comte de Cussy. These had been imported from China, their country of origin. They had been grown in oriental gardens for centuries. Cussy’s collection went on to form the basis of every French-bred peony. Calot named two classics, among others. One was the superb fully double lemon-scented ivory-white ‘Duchesse de Nemours’ (1856). The other was ‘Reine Hortense’ (1857), a pale-pink that always has a bit of magenta flecking before fading to blush-white. Both are planted here and both are widely grown by the Dutch, an indication of how vigorous these two still are.
Calot’s peonies were bought by Felix Crousse (1840-1925) of Nancy in 1850. He named ‘Monsieur Jules Elie’, which is a personal favourite of mine, in 1888. The bomb-shaped fully double deep-pink flowers have a silvery edge to the wavy outer petals. The fragrance changes throughout the day hovering between rose and coconut. Not all the flowers are completely bomb-shaped in my garden: some are semi-double with yellow centres.
This year my Jules is not going to flower, because I had to split it up last October through necessity. October is the prime time to move and divide your peonies because they enter dormancy from mid-August onwards. The myth about not moving peonies is centuries old and comes from Pliny the Elder’s Historia Naturalis written in 77-79 AD. Peonies were (and still are) powerful medicinal plants, taking their name from Paieon who was physician to the Greek Gods. If you dared to move a peony, Pliny asserted that a woodpecker would swoop down and peck out your eyes. This completely bonkers bit of information has been passed down through the centuries, by a series of Chinese whispers, and many still believe it to be true today.
I had to act, because Jules’s tubers were all on the surface and starting to go hollow so his stems had become weak and etiolated. Peonies do not enjoy being disturbed one bit. They are slow-fuse plants that take their time. I may have to wait a year or two before Jules takes his rightful place again, perhaps longer. I have a red-flecked New Zealand-bred creamy-white peony, ‘Wakatipu Wonder’, and it has taken seven years to settle and produce several flowers. It got an RHS AGM on the peony trial held at Wisley between 2016 and 2020 and I was privileged to be part of the judging forum.
Victor Lemoine (1823-1911), a famous nurseryman from Nancy, purchased Crousses’ peony collection in 1849. Lemoine went on to name ‘Sarah Bernhardt’ (1906) and ‘Solange’ (1907). ‘Sarah Bernhardt’ produces lots of apple-blossom pink flowers, so it’s widely grown commercially and privately. Purists accuse Sarah of being floppy stemmed, probably due to all that flower. No matter: it’s a gem for those who want to grow their own cut flowers. And it can always be staked!
‘Solange’ is an exceptional peony with very large creamy-white flowers that open slowly from pink streaked buds. It’s later than many and you don’t get that many flowers. If I had to pick another favourite, it would be ‘Lady Alexandra Duff’ 1891. This blush-pink peony has a ring of lavender-pink petals surrounding a full paler middle. In some years, including this one, the highly fragrant flowers are streaked in carmine-red. Carmine-red streaking also occurs on the cream-white ‘Festiva Maxima’ (Meillez 1851). This midseason peony is taller than many here.
American nurserymen also grew peonies, because they are very hardy and they also tolerate humidity. They produced brighter peonies, using a greater mix of species, so there are rich reds, corals, although they tend to lack fragrance. The coral peonies smell positively unpleasant.
‘Coral Charm’ (WIssing 1964) is early to flower and keeps its coral colour. The later ‘Coral Sunset’ (Wissing/ Klehm 1981) has larger more petalled flowers and the vivid flowers fade to apricot and then cream. They mix well with blues and could flower with Iris ‘Braithwaite’ and ‘Jane Phillips’ in sunny positions.
French-bred and English-bred peonies do well for me. However, American peonies often struggle because most of the time my garden’s cool and exposed. I saw ‘Kansas’ in Stoke City’s Garden at the Chelsea Flower Show of 2013. It was raised by Myron Bigger, a successful cut flower grower from Kansas. I hadn’t considered growing it before because an American peony book, Peonies by Allan Rogers, described ‘Kansas’ as a double-red lactiflora that ‘does well in southern climates.’
‘Kansas’ is actually an electric colour called deep fuchsia-purple and it stopped me in my tracks when I saw it at Chelsea. I bought one soon after and it had one flower. Pregnant pause and drum roll needed here. Thirteen years later, it still has one flower. Please sigh. I had to presume that Allan Rogers was colourblind to some degree. It’s well-known that many men are colourblind, 1 in 12 of them is the quoted statistic. ‘Kansas’ is not red! I’d describe it as a blue-pink.
And for what it’s worth, I have failed to succeed with other American-bred peonies of note including the sumptuous-red ‘Buckeye Belle’ and ‘Charlie’s White’. You see Cold Aston is just not as hot as central North America – except perhaps for last week when the whole country sweltered.
There are roses with them and the idea was that they would follow on after the peonies. These days they rub shoulders together. ‘Wildeve’, ‘You’re Beautiful’ and ‘Pearl Drift’ are now out with the peonies. These three roses demonstrate how tricky the colour pink can be in the garden. ‘Pearl Drift’ has cool silver-pink clusters of semi-double flowers emerging from pink buds. ‘Wildeve’ is pink with an apricot hue and ‘You’re Beautiful’ is a strident pink with coral overtones. The colour clash is helped by ‘Champagne Moment’, a buff-cream Kordes floribunda, and David Austin’s sunset pink and yellow ‘The Lark Ascending’ Thankfully, these two neutral roses knit the whole thing together visually.
I have to blend my cool-toned and warmer pinks and I use pale astrantias, blue Campanula lactiflora ‘Prichard’s Variety’ and the blue hardy Geranium ‘Orion’. Once the roses and peonies are over, or resting between flushes, the bright-pink Japanese anemone ‘Pamina’ fills the gaps. Many a gardener dismisses the Japanese anemone as a running nightmare, a thug, but I love the infusion of late-summer colour and I also love the grey seed-pearl buds and dark stems. Being semi-double helps the flowers to last.
The one combination I try to avoid is pink and yellow and this aversion goes back almost forty years. I had a white garage and bright-white is colour to be avoided in the summer garden. It acts as a full stop and brings the eye up short. I almost shiver when I see it in other people’s borders. I made a howler in the 1980s when I planted a climbing English ivy called ‘Buttercup’, named for its yellow foliage, with a cool-pink Clematis montana. It was a hideous mistake. As a serial garden blunderer I like to quote Albert Einstein. “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” The trouble is with gardening mistakes, they come back to haunt you year on year.