How I Grew A Tree Peony Near St. Petersburg

2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:47

Dream come true

More than 15 years ago, I first learned about the tree peony, or rather, I saw this plant on TV in a program about China. To say that this plant surprised me is not enough, it struck me! It was love at first sight!

Bit by bit, she began to collect information about him. In China, tree peonies (Paeonia suffruticosa) are called the flowers of emperors and are considered the embodiment of beauty. They differ from herbaceous peonies in that they are shrubs.

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And then we started selling seedlings of these peonies. I bought the desired plants, planted them in compliance with all the recommendations that could then be found, but failures followed one after another. Despite this, my desire to have a tree peony in the garden - this blooming miracle - only increased. And then one day in the spring it happened - my friend brought me two strong seedlings and said that they were tree peonies grown from seeds.

It was probably impossible to convey my joy in words. When the enthusiasm subsided a little, I thought: how to grow the seedling further, because I did not have any information about growing peonies from seeds at all, and the seedlings presented were so far only with pink cotyledon leaves. I had to trust my intuition. I planted them in the diffused shade of perennials. As further practice showed, it was the right decision.

All summer I watched the kids grow. They grew quickly. They had amazingly beautiful leaves, but what was my surprise when the leaves fell off in autumn, and only tiny trunks no more than 2 cm thick remained. It turned out that tree-like peonies have very long leaf stalks. And the wood itself grows very slowly.

I had to think about how to cover young plants for the winter - can they huddle? Nobody could answer these questions. Therefore, I just put perennials around the kids with a hut and stuck twigs around them.

Having survived a painful winter, as soon as the snow began to melt, I rushed to the dacha. Parting the stems of the shelter, I saw the blackened trunks of tree-like peonies with black, lifeless, as it seemed to me then, buds. So, failure again! I was so upset that I could not do anything in the country, I did not even begin to remove the remnants of perennials from the flower beds - in the fall I don’t cut them off so that they would help keep the snow on the site. And it turned out to be a salvation for the kids.

A week later, I returned to my dacha. When I approached the flower bed, I was very pleasantly surprised and delighted. The buds on the tree-like peonies burst and started growing. How happy I was!

Over the summer, my seedlings have grown even stronger, and their leaves have become larger. In the spring I mulch all the beds with compost, and then they got a little. And in the fall, after the leaves fell, the stem of one of them was already 5 cm thick, and that of the second - 3 cm.

So five years passed in caring for plants. During this time, one of my peony has grown to 20 cm, the second - to 12 cm. Another spring has come, and here it is - the embodiment of dreams and hopes - the peony has bloomed! The second pleased with flowering only two years later. The first flower was huge - about the size of a tea saucer, it was simple - with white petals, with a mother-of-pearl tint and a purple spot at the base, like a poppy, and a strong rose hip scent. Friends and neighbors came to admire the blossoming miracle. But many of them were very skeptical about my desire to grow such an exotic plant in my garden. They thought it would just be a waste of time and money.

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Closer to autumn, the seeds ripened on the flower, I sowed them in the best sunny spot in the garden. And that was a mistake. Two years later, the seeds sprouted, but all the seedlings died from the sun's rays. I have already sown the next batch of seeds under the protection of perennials, they have sprung up and grow safely, gaining growth and strength. And they hibernate without any shelter.

My first two bushes are over 11 years old. One of them has already reached a height of one meter, the same size and width. More than 40 flowers have already blossomed on it last spring. Moreover, with age, they became slightly smaller in size, but now the flowers are semi-double.

The flowering of tree peonies is simply mesmerizing. The second bush is still much smaller, although it blooms just as magnificently. For the winter, I throw on the bushes the lutrasil used on the beds - this is already in case of possible icy winds. That's all the shelter. Our site is located in the Petrodvortsovy district, not far from Strelna, in the Nizhnyaya Kolonya SNT, but I think that the tree-like peony will feel good in more northern regions. You just have to be patient, really want to - and a miracle will surely happen

With everyone who is interested in this plant, I will share my experience in more detail and answer all questions by phone 8-921-424-19-26

Elena Shesternina, amateur gardener

Photo by Daria Shmulevtsova