Thursday, June 3, 2010

Gardening: Peonies! And celebrating nursery errors.

Photo of a peony in a vase.
Two or three years ago, I planted some peonies that were supposed to be red, according to the packaging.

Then I waited two or three years for them to bloom, because we remodeled things and some trampling was unavoidable.

And during those years, I wondered if red was really the right choice. I'm very picky about my reds. I don't like them too magenta, and I really don't like them orange. I slowly came to the conclusion that red was a mistake.

One of them finally bloomed. And as you can see from the photo, the packaging was utterly mistaken. About the redness.

Woohoo!

Photo: Mine.

3 comments:

  1. I'm glad that your peonies came out better than you expected! :D I kind of like orangey-reds. Like poppies. Not a fan of pinky-reds.

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  2. oh how lovely!!! I tend to gravitate to pinks and purples for my garden

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  3. Thanks, Kyna! I do like the traffic-cone-orange Oriental poppies. And I was surprised by a couple of highly saturated magenta peonies; it turns out that I like those, too. And I like pink that has no ambition beyond pink. But most peonies that try to be full-fledged fire-engine red seem to fall at it.

    Hey, Frida! Looking around my May garden, it seems to be leaning heavily toward the pinks and purples, too. They make me happy, though I am pleased that one Oriental poppy that I purchased in hope of fire-engine red, is indeed just that.

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