Bossing The Blooms

No, I haven’t found a magical way to make peonies grow in Austin – these flowers appear by permission of my youngest sister - she took their photos in her Illinois garden. They’re lovely, fragrant, old-fashioned, doubled peonies, ready to cut for vases.

My sister said she wished she could hold back the peonies until out-of-state guests arrive in a couple of weeks. That reminded me of an old trick for keeping peonies in storage, ready for June graduations and parties. Maybe you already know about it? Or is this another of those things that longtime gardeners mistakenly think everyone knows? Please let me know if you’ve done this, too.

The hard part is that you have to live where peonies grow – which eliminates many of us! And you need a couple of established peony plants like my sister’s. If I were at her house we’d go out and cut stems about 10 or 12 inches long, with buds that show some petal color, and are just starting to swell – something bigger than a golf ball – smaller than a tennis ball. There are several good buds at lower right in the photo below.

The flower buds need to be perfectly dry so you don’t get mold! Remove any leaves. Wrap each stem individually in paper towels or newspaper, bundle 6 or 8 stems together and slip them in a plastic bag. I used to use the sleeves in which the newspaper arrived. Cut a few more than you need, since some may be duds.
The bundles go on a refrigerator shelf, with the heads facing in. About twenty-four to thirty-six hours before you want to arrange them for your table, you take the peonies out, recut the ends and put them in water and most of them will be fine and unfold. Then make your arrangement, adding fresh peony foliage to make them look just cut. Be amused as your friends search your garden looking for the peony plant that blooms after all the others are done.

You can use this technique to delay peony bloom for a couple of weeks… wait too long and they'll probably still open, but the flower petals get dry on the edges. Have fun!