We are officially entering peony season. The famed flora flowers from mid-April to early July, offering a romantic, colourful and soft-petaled addition to a garden, though they look fantastic cut and displayed in a vase too. There are around 33 species of peony, which makes choosing the perfect one for you something of a challenge. To narrow down the options, we asked a number of garden designers to pick their favourite variety.
Andy Sturgeon
“I tend to favour the simplicity of single flowers over large blousey doubles and the scented Himalayan peony (Paeonia emodi) is no exception. Being pure white with a crown of golden stamens at the centre I use it in more naturalistic plantings particularly amongst ferns where it will grow even in dappled shade.”
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Robert Myers
“My favourite peony has to be Paeonia tenuifolia, the delicate and utterly charming fern-leaf peony. With its finely cut, feathery foliage and vivid crimson single blooms, it brings a lightness and elegance to the garden that few other peonies can match. We first discovered it while researching our Florence Nightingale Garden for the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, as it was one of Florence’s favourite plants and featured in her childhood pressed flower collection.”
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Pip Morrison
“I love a variety called 'Merry Mayshine' (Paeonia tenuifolia) which has elegant finely cut foliage - a nod to its parent Peony tenuifolia though it is much more robust than that species. The young foliage is bronze coloured when it first emerges in March and remains looking good long after the flowers have finished. The upward facing single flowers are a wonderful shade of crimson with a mass of creamy yellow stamens in the centre.”
Andy Monaghan
“Flowering over a long season on strong sturdy stems, the Itoh peony Julia Rose has it all. Fragrant, semi double blooms open an extraordinary apricot tinged with raspberry, to reveal a simple ring of stamens. As the flowers age they turn a sumptuous faded gold, and as with all Itohs, the foliage has great autumn colour too, so whether for the garden or the vase, you get a lot of bang for your buck. Itoh peonies can take a little longer to bulk up than herbaceous peonies, but are well worth the wait. Classy with a healthy touch of camp, Julia Rose sits firmly at the top of my list.”
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Petra Ulrik & Miguel Ogando, DOS Landscapes
"Back at my homeland, in Hungary, folklore is enriched by the presence of peony. It is said to open around Pentecost, a celebration that falls on the 50th day after Easter, and so it’s commonly called the Pentecost Rose. A symbol of love and fertility, it’s a great motif for folk songs and embroidery. When someone smiles with a wide grin, we say the smile is like a peony. My grandma, a fond gardener, grew a peony which brought out ruby flower heads as large as a hand. She fed it with composted horse manure and it carried on flowering for 20 years.
Each year we venture out to explore wildflower meadows around Europe and when you find a peony, well, you know you found something special. Their habitat varies; some are out in the open steppes in shallow dry soil, others on the edge of the woodland. The beauty about these wild varieties is that they are robust and sturdy, no need to prop them up, they stand strong in the winds and dry grounds of remote wilderness.
Learning from these encounters we prefer to choose varieties in our designs which hold well and can naturalise over time.
In Portugal, up at the Coa Valley, we came across Paeonia officinalis macrocarpa. Nestled under a hedge and some young oak seedlings, its seed pods were covered in silver suede hairs. Sicily’s Paeonia mascula bears dark blackcurrant coloured seeds surrounded by meaty almost cyclamen seed heads. These are varieties that can be found with specialist nurseries in the UK. They are fully hardy and will bring endless joy in May, when planted in organic clusters in semi to full shaded borders and meadows.
This May we are in Greece exploring meadows and crossing our fingers for a Paeonia parnassica encounter at Mount Parnassos – with any luck in flower."
Charlotte Rowe
“Like most people, I love peonies. One of my favourites is Peony Lord Kitchener (Paeonia lactiflora) for a number of reasons. It is a single flower variety (which I love) and is a really wonderful deep plum/burgundy red with bright yellow stamens, with dark leaves and stems. One of the things I love about this variety is that it closes itself up on dull gloomy days and then opens up on sunny days. I had this as a feature plant in my 2014 show garden at RHS Chelsea Flower Show which marked the centenary of the start of World War One – the name Lord Kitchener totally appropriate for the theme of the garden.”
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Caroline Clayton, Viditras Studio
“My favourite Paeonia is Peony 'Claire de Lune'. I love its pale lemon-yellow flowers and delicate scent; it has a real old-world charm. The foliage looks so lush and fresh when it emerges. I enjoy planting spring-flowering bulbs like Crocus (my favourite is 'Orange Monarch' ) alongside it to add interest before the shoots appear above ground!”
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Miria Harris
“Of all peonies, it is the scented ones with an ombré like quality, changing from one colour to another as the flowers age, that I love the most. ‘Immaculée’ is my current favourite, it has the most delicious piquant sweet smell and starts off looking like a bowl of freshly whipped cream that’s been lightly stained by the juice of some raspberries, as if like an Eton Mess. Then miraculously, the pink stain fades away until its petals are immaculately white and not at all messy.”
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Marianne Boswall
"I generally plant the species peony at the edge of a shady spot. A natural woodlander, it looks good with hellebores and melica alba. But I do have a weakness for the rococo abundance of lemon scented Paeonia Itoh Bartzella which goes so well en masse with the liriodendron tulipifera (tulip tree) it resembles for a thoroughly ornamental moment. Attractive to butterflies, bees and also pollinated by ants, it is an intersectional or hybrid cross between a tree peony and a herbaceous peony, so slightly lower growing than a tree peony and holds its fabulous heads without staking.
I am lucky to have Little Budds Peony Farm near me in Kent, a great resource!"
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Butter Wakefield
“I love the ‘Buckeye Belle’ (Paeonia broteroi). The lovely large early blooms with their central dash of yellow are great for the pollinators! They are also a wonderful addition to flower arrangements, if conditioned after cutting they will last for up to a week.”
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Marcus Barnett
“Peonies are wonderful in the flower bed as they are such an explosion of colour and scale, and great for picking too. Broadly categorised by their growth habit (herbaceous or tree) and flower form (single, semi-double, double, etc.), I like double peonies as they are so impactful, and am fond of Paeonia ‘Festiva Maxima’. It is largely dusty pale pink with a few ink drops of deeper pink/light red at the centre. Opulent, blousy and delicate in fragrance; it’s like having Mrs. Slocombe in the garden!”
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Sheila Jack
“Whilst I rarely plant peonies, so fleeting but utterly beautiful, I really love the early varieties and in particular the fat pink shoots of Paeonia Mlokosewitchii or ‘Molly the witch’ pushing up through dark earth marking the progression of spring with its tight buds fattening and then opening as soft lemon cupped shaped flowers amongst glaucous foliage.”
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Lulu Urquhart & Adam Hunt, Urquhart & Hunt
"We really really love Peonies. They have an ephemeral quality and delicate form that astound in beauty. The more we plant in our gardens, for ourselves and for others, the happier we feel; such is their reliability and the pleasure they bring from first emergence of burgundy red stems to final fall of cherry-red toned leaves in autumn; the pleasure of ripe balls of beauty in their bud, and the paper-tissue petals that unfurl at that moment in late spring when you are ready for a vase of astounding grace for your home, or just to enjoy their beautiful blooms and share them with the bees.
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My go to peony is the Tree Peony (Paeonia rockii); an investment for sure, but for me an incredibly precious presence for any garden. They bring jewelled beauty to shadier woodland type gardens and landscapes, and stand the test of time, growing each year in stature and beauty and for me increasing my affection and gratitude for them in equal measure. A variable shell pink to white tree peony growing to 1.5m, it has burgundy ink splodges spilled into the well of the petal bowl" - Lulu Urquhart.
