It rained for pretty much all of last week, which trashed the tree peonies. This happens every year without fail. Just as the peonies reach their peak, the clouds roll in and reduce them to a sodden mess. Every. Single. One. Thanks, Mother Nature -- those peonies are short-lived enough without your meddling! Look what you've done:
But I have to be forgiving. Not just because there's not a damned thing I can do about it, but also because immediately after this destruction, just in the nick of time to ward off post-peony depression, the Rhododendrons sprang into exuberant flower!
This most certainly does NOT happen every year. These rhodies were among the very first plants we put into our garden in its infancy. We put in three on what would someday become the main path up to the terraces (there was just a scraggly unkempt hill behind them then), and three more along the driveway. Here are their first grade class pictures:
Over the years while they have always grown in size, their blooms have been hit or miss, due to a variety of calamities from hungry deer, to late frosts, early snows, and haphazard application of appropriate fertilizer. This year, miraculously, everything seems to have gone right, and the early rains that did in the peonies apparently nourished the rhodies at the ideal moment, and --voila! -- a veritable explosion of blooms. Here, 11 years later, are their High School Yearbook Portraits:
They've also been joined by a recent transfer. Last year we welcomed a standard Rhododendron on the other side of the terrace path. It was a bit malnourished and unloved when it arrived, and produced no blooms at all last season. But whatever encouraged our existing crew also coaxed the new arrival back to life and it has enthusiastically joined team blossom this year.
The rhodies are also a bit more hardy, holding onto their flowers for two weeks so far, through several rainstorms, and look as though they might have a week or so more left in them. By that time, we'll have our next peony bloom with our "intersectionals" -- a hybrid cross between tree peonies and the herbaceous variety, with the upright habit of the former and the dying-back habit of the latter. But that's for a later post. In the meantime, I did find one tree peony blossom that survived the deluge; the absolute last gasp for those beauties this year. And I'm not the only one happy about finding it; there's a pollen-drunk bee that's also an admirer.
The last gasp of the Tree Peonies.