2018 To My Wife The Queen of Southern Peony

This doesn't happen super often, but this time it was especially sentimental. My husband gave me a birthday card that just melted my heart. The thoughts he wrote on the inside were nice too, but the envelope is what really got me. I have been growing peonies for 15 years now, and running this site for 9. No one has ever referenced me in this way (addressing my love of peonies), and it really got me. He addressed the envelope to my birthday card "To My Wife The Queen of Southern Peony". What a nice way to recognize and pay homage to something that is such passion of mine and a big part of my life. :-) Sorry this is a little sappy, but I just had to share it with you all! It really made my heart jump!


Birthday Card Envelope
"To My Wife The Queen of Southern Peony"

2018 Song Sparrow Peony Root Sprouting in the Fall

Newly Planted Peony 'Glowing Candles'
Sending Up an Fall Sprout
Awww, man. A peony I ordered from the 2018 Fall Peony Sale @ Song Sparrow and just planted three weeks ago is already sprouting. Of course it looks like a nice sprout that probably would have produced a bud and flower next spring. When this happens it seems like these peonies take so much longer to become established here. It seems like they are just confused, but what is confusing to me is why is this root really sprouting? I have ordered peonies from other vendors in Wisconsin, without this issue. I used to think it was sprouting just because it came from a cooler region of the country, but now I am wondering if it is because this root has already been in some kind of cold storage, and it thinks it has already experienced winter. Now that it has arrived here in my Southern garden, it thinks our temperate autumn days feel like spring (and they probably do).


Peony 'Glowing Candles' Sign
This problem has occurred a several times in the past, but it looks like I've only recorded it here two other times, 2012 Newly Planted Peony Sprouting in Fall and 2016 New Peony Breaking Dormancy Too Early. I seem to remember this happening several times with roots from Song Sparrow, I guess I will have to record this whenever it happens in the future so I can keep a better record of which vendors this happens with. Of the two listed above, one of those was from Song Sparrow (2012), and the other one was from Ebay (2016) - which who knows where that peony root came from originally? The problem with these early sprouts is that they are quickly killed by the cold winter temperature, and the root has just wasted quite a bit of energy sending up this sprout. I never really know what to do with these sprouts, cut them off, let them grow. I worry that if I snap them off, another bud on the same root will try to sprout, wasting another chance for the peony to grow in the spring. I usually end up watching this small, lonely sprout grow as much as it can before winter's cold comes and makes it wither into limp nothingness. :-( What do you do with your fall peony foliage "sprouts"?

2018 Dismal Seed Production Year

Empty Peony 'Martha W.' Seed Pods
It was a very dismal year for seed production, especially for the intersectional hybrids I'm working on. I actually got zero seeds! (Zero!), which is very disappointing considering I used so many different varieties of tree peony pollen this year, many frozen and several fresh too! I'm guessing it must have something to do with the weather, since the seed production on many of my other lactiflora peonies was almost nil as well. When I look back at the weather history for April of this year - 2018, it looks like most nights were in the 40s and 50s, but we did get a few 30s later in the month. On 4/17 it was 33°, on 4/20 it was 34°, on 4/21 it was 37°, and on 4/30 it was 36°. Even my Peony 'Green Lotus' and Peony 'Pink Spritzer' (which are usually loaded with seeds) produced nothing as well. The seed pods on my Peony 'Martha W.' plants grew and swelled normally (as if they were incubating lots of fresh black seeds), but when they popped open there was nothing inside but tiny, black failed seeds. Oh well, I guess there's always another opportunity next year, and there's still hoping some of the seeds from previous years (2016 First Intersectional Peony Seeds! and 2017 Intersectional Peony Hybridizing Efforts) will germinate this spring. We shall see...