Peonies Take Rich Soil, Time, Plenty Of Patience To Grow

Tidewater Gardens

May 30, 1993|By LAWRENCE GRIFFIN Columnist

Peonies have an aura of nostalgia unlike almost any other flower. Seems like everyone's grandmother grew them in their gardens, and few seem to grow them now.

Maybe it's their reputation for being difficult, for ``not doing anything for at least three years.'' Maybe, at $5 - sometimes $25 to $50 a pop - they are too often made to sound like an investment, with all the weight, gravity and planning that go with the decision to purchase them.

If you have sunny ground, and have grown flowers before, peonies are not the bears they are thought to be. If you can find them already potted and grown on, the way most garden centers sell them, they can be planted most any time when they're offered for sale.

This is not to say that peonies can be thrown into any sort of ground and be expected to reward you with a dozen stems of flowers. We've talked about what constitutes well-prepared ground before. It ranges somewhere between the strenuous and backbreaking.

Quickly: Remove or kill off the turf or weeds. Turn over the soil to 12 inches for strenuous, 18 inches for backbreaking. Turn it over again. Find rotted organic matter, rob good soil from somewhere else or buy many bags of topsoil - not potting soil - and many bags of cow manure and add to the area. Turn again.

If you haven't lost interest in the project, you're probably ready to plant. If you've bought peonies in a container, already grown, plant so that the level of the soil around the peonies is exactly where it was in the pot.

If you're planning to prepare your bed in the summer in order to plant bare root peonies roots in the fall, set your bare root crowns so that the red eyes are on the top of the crown of roots and exactly 1 inch below the surface of the soil.

Peonies like a rich soil, which may be the cause of their difficult reputation. Rotted manure, peat moss or leafmold can dramatically improve a heavy soil, as can the aforementioned topsoil or cow manure.

A sandy soil, which also benefits from the addition of organic matter, is well-suited to peony growing so long as the fertility of the soil can be maintained with either chemical or organic fertilizers.

There's another item I've spent some time thinking about and that's that there's something to letting the natural lawn reestablish itself, a little bit.

I have my lawn cut every two weeks. It gets long after a time, but just now the back lawn is awash in brilliant yellow buttercup.

I do cut more often the area around the newly replanted perennial bed and the things that set around it: clumps of tall ornamental grasses, a red Japanese maple, a shadbush and a border of mock orange and forsythia. I couldn't stand to see the tall lawn grass obscure their precisely mulched borders and beds that make a pattern in the smooth, cut grass.

The rest of the lawn manages never to look all the same all the time. By tomorrow, the buttercups will have been mown, and the lawn will have changed, and I'll still keep cut low the area around the perennial bed, because I want that to look right.

I was recently in denial about my lettuce patch, just couldn't bring myself to weed out the grass that had grown faster than the lettuce. I could never weed all that, I thought.

Finally, after the hardest of rains, I did set to the patch and now have more lettuce than grass. I want nothing more than to get back out to the patch and rid the lettuce of the rest of the grass and watch the variegated patch of red, green, crinkled and flat lettuces start their heading up.

Griffith is a professional gardener from the Middle Peninsula. Send your questions to Gardening Column, Daily Press, MP1203, 7505 Warwick Blvd., Newport News 23607.

Daily Press Articles