Like much of the rest of the world, I love garden peonies\u2014Paeonia lactiflora–for their lush, unabashedly sumptuous flowers and gorgeous colors.\u00a0 A single bloom in a tall bottle constitutes an elegant arrangement. Snip a handful of stems and you can create an over-the-top floral extravaganza.\u00a0 No wonder they are popular as wedding flowers, particularly for the well-heeled, who can afford to indulge in hundreds of wide-open peonies for a single ceremony.<\/p>\n
If some peonies have a flaw, it is light or nonexistent scent.\u00a0 Even varieties that do not tickle your nose still bring something unique and special to the garden, but in my view, the peonies with strong fragrance are the best of all.<\/p>\n
My favorite peony is deep rose in color and perfumes the air with a pervasive, intoxicating old-rose scent.\u00a0 It is full of mystery, with a name and a history that I do not know.\u00a0 It came with the house, but I am not sure which of the previous owners planted it.\u00a0 The only certainty is that I found it growing\u2014or trying to grow\u2014in the shade of a mammoth yew shrub in the front garden.\u00a0 In our first year here, it produced a few glossy, green leaves, but didn\u2019t stand a chance of putting out flowers while enveloped in the stygian darkness under the yew branches.<\/p>\n
Peonies have a reputation for not liking disturbance, but I threw caution to the wind because I was afraid that a perfectly good plant was going to die for lack of light.\u00a0 I dug the root up carefully, only to have it split in two in my hands the minute it was out of the ground.\u00a0 Having made it my business to save the peony, I decided to take both halves and plant them in sunny spaces in the back garden.\u00a0 I figured they couldn\u2019t fare any worse than in their previous location and might do a lot better.<\/p>\n
To my great relief, the sundered peony root sections flourished and in the second year produced their first blooms.\u00a0 Then and now, they are double-flowered, with lots of big rosy petals and an abundance of plump round buds.\u00a0 As with all herbaceous peonies, these buds secrete a sticky substance that draws ants, but I don\u2019t care.<\/p>\n
I am not sure I noticed the fragrance the first year I grew these orphan peonies, but I certainly did thereafter.\u00a0\u00a0 Whether the blooms are basking in the garden sunshine or sitting indoors on the dining room table, they exude a strong perfume that is identical to that produced by some of my old-fashioned rose varieties.\u00a0 And since a single mystery peony bloom is as big as about six \u2018Felicia\u2019 roses, the scent is even more powerful.<\/p>\n
Not knowing is a terrible thing and I have scoured peony reference sources in an effort to find the name of my rose-scented garden delight.\u00a0 The best I can do is identify probable candidates.\u00a0 Dating my plant is hard, because peonies tend to be long lived.\u00a0 Logic says that mine was probably planted when the yew was small enough so it did not shade the peony.\u00a0 That means the peony was probably at least twenty years old when I discovered it seventeen years ago.\u00a0 The strong scent suggests late nineteenth or early twentieth century breeding, because that was a time when intense fragrance was highly sought after among hybridizers and peony fanciers.\u00a0 Of course, it is possible to plant a newly propagated example of an old variety in a brand new garden, so the jury is still out on the age of both my particular peony and its variety.<\/p>\n
Despite the variables in the heritage equation, I have identified several possible candidates.\u00a0 One is called, quite appropriately, \u2018Vivid Rose\u2019.\u00a0 Introduced in 1952, it has double flowers, like mine, and is described as being fragrant.\u00a0 The pictures look right, though I would not describe the color of my peony as \u201cvivid\u201d.\u00a0 Another candidate is the appealing \u2018Better Times\u2019.\u00a0 The color, described as \u201cdeep rose pink\u201d is right, and the fragrance descriptor–\u201crose scent\u201d–is on the mark.\u00a0 It came out in 1941, which places it in the running as far as the age of the variety and\/or the specimen. The \u201ccerise-rose\u201d \u2018Dayton\u2019, introduced in 1962, looks right too and has a rose fragrance, but some sources say it has a slightly \u201csilvery\u201d look. I have only a miniscule knowledge of the vast universe of peonies, but based on the research so far, I think \u2018Better Times\u2019 is the leading contender.<\/p>\n
Unless I can get a peony expert to take a look at my rose-scented specimen when it is in bloom, I may never find out its real name. \u00a0That will have to do. \u00a0Though I like to know the details of a plant\u2019s provenance, it is not always essential.\u00a0 In this case, I can get all the satisfaction I will ever need by letting the perfume waft over me.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Like much of the rest of the world, I love garden peonies\u2014Paeonia lactiflora–for their lush, unabashedly sumptuous flowers and gorgeous colors.\u00a0 A single bloom in a tall bottle constitutes an elegant arrangement. Snip a handful of stems and you can create an over-the-top floral extravaganza.\u00a0 No wonder they are popular as wedding flowers, particularly for … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,2,3],"tags":[1415,1416,302,1417,551],"class_list":["post-1891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall","category-general-interest","category-spring","category-summer","tag-garden-peonies","tag-paeonia-lactiflora","tag-peonies","tag-scented-peonies","tag-spring-perennials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1891"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1891\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1892,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1891\/revisions\/1892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}