Radhika's Essay about Peonies and Garden Club Friendships

 A Bomb Paeonia Roots Friendships

“From the earth we came; to the earth we return. In between we garden.” (Alfred Austin, English Poet Laureate (1835-1913). Luckily, because I belong to a garden club, I never garden alone. Whenever I fall in love with a plant, I reach out to my gardening friends to ask if they grow it and if they would share a start? One such plant was the Paeonia ‘Red Charm’ that I first saw in a Denver garden. I love peonies. They are low maintenance, deer and slug-resistant, survive benign neglect, don’t need constant division, and can live for decades in the one spot. Botrytis blight is controlled with pruning. I grow peonies—the pink, delicately fragrant ‘Sarah Bernhardt’, the nun-like white ‘Duchess de Nemours’— but I had never seen a merlot-red peony so huge it made my eyes pop. Its seductive color left me drunk with craving. I coveted its sturdy stem, its lush foliage, the perfect 9-inch roundness of its flowers. I wanted its explosion of ruffled, petaloid petals surrounded by a ring of larger guard petals, so tightly packed it was no wonder it was classified as a “bomb peony.” The flower’s elusive scent of cloves instantly wafted me back to India, my birth country. I had to have it.

This peony, I learned, was a hybrid created by crossing a Paeonia lactiflora and a Paeonia officinalis. Introduced in 1944 by Illinois grower Lyman Glasscock, it won the American Peony Society’s gold medal award in 1956. I asked my gardening friends: Could they help me find a start as I’d had no success at the nurseries? My British-born friend Audrey Plummer, a lover of fuchsias, stepped up. She spread the word. Dutch-born friend Carolina Wagemans, who grew dahlias and even had one named in her honor, brought in a start for me. Following instructions, I planted the tuber in full sun, in well-draining soil, avoided planting it too deep to encourage it to flower, and gave its promise of huge flowers some structural support.

After a couple of years of impatient waiting, I saw the first buds, with ants slurping their sweet sap. When the flowers opened, way earlier than the other peonies in my garden, I called Audrey and Carolina, thanked them and sent them photos of the first bloom. I took one flower to my house-bound neighbor. It almost toppled over her bud vase! I took another to the assisted living center which my garden club supports. I was immediately surrounded by residents, who said, like I had, that they had never seen a peony so red and so full.

Sadly, both friends have since passed away, becoming one with the earth they loved so well. I mourn them still, but I also remember how three first-generation immigrants obliterated national borders by sharing a bomb peony hybridized in America. The wine-red flowers are a toast to our shared love of gardening. The plant they gifted me is thriving, so I know that friendship and memories, like peonies, endure.