A Comedy of Peonies

Or tragedy, depends on your view

Twenty-four years ago in March, as I recall, I decided that it was time to take dominion of the wilderness that was the exterior of our rental home. There was one Rose of Sharon bush tight against the east side of the house, and one immensely overgrown juniper shrub outside the kitchen windows on the west. Other than that, there was not one beautifying feature around the place. It had a curb appeal of about negative twelve.

I figured that one great way to start with beautifying the wasteland would be to transplant some perennial roots. We did not have money to buy a lot of plants, but we had lots and lots of country friends who were happy to share. Back at the farm my mom had a row of glorious peonies that she had divided and replanted until it was about thirty feet long. My favorite ones were a pale pink that faded to creamy white (they looked like this) just before the petals fell off. Mom said I could have all I wanted. I thrust a shovel into the dense peony roots in that row and I took out a hefty clump for myself.

I remembered when we got the original clump. When we moved to the farm, Mom had set to befriending all the neighbors around us. Among them was an elderly lady just up the hill from the farm. She always wore rubber boots and scarves and she puttered about on her acreage, fiercely determined not to let her children put her into a home. We were walking past one day and admiring her peonies out beside the road where they were dipping heavy heads to the ground after a rain. She came over to talk, “I have tried and tried to get those peenies out of the lawn, but even when I think I got all the roots, they come back. These are old plants, really old! You want some peenies? You can come get ‘em next spring when the shoots first come up. That’s the best time. You can get ‘em all. I have more in the back yard.”

I was charmed. Even better than having flowers was having flowers with a story, and I did not forget those “peenies” the next spring. Mom and I took a spade and some grocery bags and dug them up to set in our own flowerbeds. We tried to get all the roots to accommodate our elderly friend, but for years to come I saw those peonies in the lawn every spring with grassy seedheads mixed in among the blooms. The old lady’s grandson usually mowed over them about midsummer.

At my own little house, the pink peonies struggled. We didn’t have soil for growing things; we had fill dirt that had been dumped there after road crews scraped it off the sides of the roads in spring. It was tainted with road salt, loose car parts, and rusty aerosole cans. Our children loved to do archeological digs and regularly turned up hubcaps and radiator covers under the crown vetch of the bank. It was truly trash dirt, but I tried to grow things anyway. I gave my plantings generous helpings of composted horse manure and mushroom mulch and hoped for the best. My peony transplants produced a few more stalks and leaves each successive year, but they only yielded about 3 or 4 small blooms. It was not enough.

I bought a truckload of topsoil and made a brand new bed, where I transplanted all my languishing plants, and finally! there was a spring where the bushes were loaded with fat, round buds. I checked them every day to see if they had any ants licking up their nectar just before they popped open.

In my footsteps there followed a chubby toddler who shared my love for plants and soil. She observed everything, and daily she brought me treasures to inspect: tiny seed cones from the hemlock trees, cute rocks, miniscule wildflower blooms that grew on the bank. One morning she approached me with yet another offering. “Look, Mama,” she exulted. “I found balls!” She held out clever little hands cupped around all the peony buds she could carry.

I stared, stunned, at the gift she was offering me and at the ground where she had dropped the ones she couldn’t carry. They were indeed balls. I looked into her cherubic face framed in bouncy curls, did a bit of deep breathing, and accepted her present.

(I ask you, how could I not accept it?) After I had counted to about eighty-seven, we had a calm talk about baby flowers that are not ready to pick yet.

When I inspected the peony bushes more closely, I found that she had missed 3 or 4 buds at the back of the bushes, so it was exactly the way it had been for years.

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Bonus: a photo of one of the digs in our trash dirt. They persisted in calling them treasures, and any disposal of the treasures had to happen when they were fast asleep.