Gardener's Garden
Tree Peonies: Real Show Stoppers
Ratchet up your gardening drama with this spectacular "show stopper"!
My garden diary says that tree peonies bloom here around the last week of April, but several of mine bloomed March 31 this year. These show stoppers are 'OMG' unbelievably beautiful with HUGE flowers! Every garden needs several. Tree peonies are quite different from herbaceous peonies. The latter blooms about a month later, dies back to the ground every fall, and has smaller flowers. Tree peonies are woody-stemmed slender shrubs which will grow to their mature size of 3 to 4 ft tall in eight years, with 6 to 9 inch wide flowers (dramatically enormous). Never hard prune a tree peony (unless you want to remove dead wood or to shape it) because it is a 'woody' and will take forever to grow back. The large blossoms of tree peonies have a …
