Friday Fabulous Flower - yellow tree peony

 Here we are half way through May, and right on time TPP's favorite peony flowers, Paeonia suffruticosa, and it has never looked better.  It is Yellow, the herbaceous peonies don't come in yellow except for the now common Itoh hybrids.  This particular plant is just outside of the kitchen window so no one sees it just passing by.  It was absolutely covered in flowers which open just a week or so later than the pink to purple tree poenies featured in this blog just recently on May 5.  Even Mrs. Phactor, who is a bit jaded about tree peonies admitted that it was gorgeous this year.  It took quite a few years to get this big, about a 4 foot diameter rounded shrub.  Hope everyone enjoys this FFF.

Friday Fabulous Flowers - Tree Peonies

TPP is known for his love of tree peonies.  None of them actually become trees in our climate, just sort of coarse bushes.  They are rather slow growing and a bit picky about where they grow, but they have just huge beautiful flowers in some shocking pinks.  Here's three flowers in three shades of pink (TPP has several more colors including yellow, which flower a bit later in the season).  And the flowers are handspan across, about 8".  

Favorite flowers

One of TPP's favorite times of year is just after the early magnolias, the big leaf magnolias flower, and so do the tree peonies, Paeonia suffruticosa. In our climate the woody stems will get to around 3-4 feet tall and the shrubs are rounded.  And they bear the biggest, gaudiest flowers.  They are just so damned adorable.  Here' one of our favorite colors, the cultivar's name is long gone, sorry.  They come in a wide array of colors on the white to fuchsia scale, and then yellow!  How can you not just love these?  

Tree Peonies in flower

Tree peonies?  Most people are confused, but indeed, one species Peonia suffruticosa.  TPP discovered their existence by accident when a graduate student after he rejuvenated an old shrub growing along side the Phactor's apartment, and it burst forth the next spring with these huge, pink tissue-paper peony flowers as big as your head.  It was love at first sight. This species doesn't grow up north where the Phactors came from, so this was a whole new thing. These shrubs are only sort of woody, and not a tree at all, but they produce huge flowers and they can be yellow (!), which without hybridization you don't find in herbaceous peonies.  This particular image show three of TPP's 9 tree peonies at their flowering peak, and with rain predicted, they won't look this good again.  You can imagine what rain does to such large, double flowers. The tallest of these is about 4 feet.  

Woodland peony

It's a good colorful garden this week because TPP's tree peonies and the fern-leafed peony are all in flower. TPP has blogged about his tree peonies before (here, here, here, here) and the fern-leafed peony too (here and here), and it would not bother him to do another as he isn't tired of them or proud. But lurking in a shady area are several less gaudy peonies that are native to forest communities (Paeonia japonica) so they are shade-loving herbaceous perennials and they grow rather like a trillium and are in that size range. They were slow to establish but now seem to be quite tough and some seedlings are showing up even though it usually takes two years for the seeds to germinate.  The flowers are 2-3 inches in diameter and white; growing above a colony of wild ginger they are utterly charming.

Friday Fabulous Flower - bear with me

Oh, yes, you've all seen TPP's tree peonies before, but do bear with me.  These marvelous flowers are only around for a brief time and they are so fabulous that TPP just cannot help himself, and while the same plants, each year they are a bit different.  A couple of days ago the first three to flower, all pink ones, looked great, but now 3 days of rain have ruined the display.  This image was grabbed just before the rain began, and this year the tree peonies were ahead of the fern-leafed peonies.  At any rate enjoy; TPP does. 

Friday Fabulous Flower - Yellow tree peony and friend

Next to magnolias and other magnoliales TPP's favorite flowers are tree peonies, and among those nothing is better looking than my yellow tree peonies.  This particular plant is about 4 feet tall and 4 feet in diameter.  This year it has a couple of dozen of these huge yellow flowers.  This year the bastard balm (yes, that's its common name), one of the showier members of the mint family was in full bloom at the same time so everyone gets a two-fer to make up for some of the Friday's missed.  As this is being typed the peony is about 6 feet to my left just below the window, and the floral fragrance, such that it is, a hard to describe floral muskiness is quite evident.  Eh, you don't grow them for their fragrance.  The yellow-flowered tree peonies routinely flower several days behind the white and pink flowered ones.  TPP has one of the Itoh hybrids with yellow flowers but they just aren't as commanding a presence.  They lack the red highlights in the center.  The hybrids are hardy, fast-growing, and vigorous, but they still seem as light beer is to a full-bodied lager.     

Friday Fabulous Flower - Tree Peony

Tree peonies are not trees; they aren't even very good shrubs.  Let's just say they are somewhat woody subshrubs, but their flowers are amazing.  Flowers as big as your head, flowers more than a hand span across, and some marvelous colors too.  All with the look of having been made of tissue paper.  This particular variety has white flowers with an ever so slight pinkish cast, and it is a single meaning that it wasn't bred to have huge numbers of petals.  This one beats all my other tree peonies, a range of pink, rose, coral, and purple flowered ones, and they all beat the yellow tree peonies by about a week.  Until they started marketing intersectional hybrids, yellow flowers were only found in the tree peonies. They can be very slow to establish, remaining rather wimpy sprigs for years in some cases, or they can bush out and become spectacular.  With tree peonies you get what you pay for (except maybe the color - the Phactor has been stiffed a couple of times); older plants cost more, but 3-5 yr old ones will blossom sooner and more reliably.  Since they don't like being transplanted, even older ones are just not in the trade.

Not enough tree peonies yet

The magic of digital photography allows us to enjoy certain blooms for much longer than they last in the garden. After reading a fairly accurate description of short comings, and eye-popping value of tree peonies over at the Garden Rant, the Phactor chided them a bit in a comment, but then decided maybe we haven't had enough pictures of them in flower yet. So here's a new addition to the stable, part of the back drop of a Japanese garden, remarkable, but ephemeral beauty. Hopefully the hint of pink comes through, but the red pistils are a bit muted in this image. The flower is about 9" across.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Tree Peony

One of the Phactors great weaknesses is a love of tree peonies. This morning 5 of them in full bloom could be seen from my patio, 4 ranging in color from light pink to purple, and 1 yellow (a particular favorite). So one of them will be today's fabulous flower now that the blogger maintenance is done and us bloggers again have access to our blogs. Each of these blooms is 8-9 inches across. Wow! These are challenging plants in this area; slow to establish, a bit fragile, so now the lure of the intersectional Itoh hybrids is calling where you get the large flowers and great colors in an herbaceous perennial. They appear to flower a bit later than the tree peonies, which flower after the fern-leafed and woodland P. japonica, so a report will be filed later. This will be their 1st flowering season so who knows perhaps another FFF will be in the offing.