Pretty pictures: Paeonia cvv.

Peonies have always struck me as a little too -- too froofy, too big, too campy. Like a falling-down-drunk drag queen with half a watermelon on her head, trying to do a Carmen Miranda impersonation and angrily insisting that everybody watch. Not just excessive, but somehow embarrassingly excessive.

And the ant thing doesn't help, either.

But as with most things, they become interesting if you look at them closely enough. And this first one, frankly, knocks my socks off. Not saying I'm ready to buy one for the yard, but I can see why somebody would, now.¹






I was also not previously aware that there existed yellow-flowering peonies. This seems . . . wrong. Though if it's not screaming hot pink, I suppose I could be okay with it. I still haven't seen any yellow peonies actually planted in someone's yard -- this one is from a garden center in Iowa City a few weeks ago.


This is more what I think of when I think "peony." Ostrich-feather fans, Vegas showgirls, those new kinds of fireworks that seem to explode for a minute and a half, blue-dyed chrysanthemums² the size of a baby's head. It's not terrible, viewed on its own terms, but I don't think I could handle having one of these in the yard.


This last one is of a tree peony, which are a lot less common around here. In fact, I think there may only be one in the entire town. It's a monster -- probably eight feet across and four feet tall, loaded with blooms -- and maybe that's part of why more people don't plant them. I tried taking photos of the whole thing, and they didn't turn out well (still learning the new camera³), so you don't get to see, but it was impressive. And the blooms, individually, aren't terrible either.


-

¹ And by the way -- do fern-leaf peonies only bloom for like three days and then that's it? I tried to get a halfway decent picture when they all bloomed here a few weeks ago, and failed, but didn't figure it was a big deal, because they're peonies, they'll bloom again. But they haven't bloomed again. Any of them. The foliage is interesting, and the flowers are okay when present, but considering how expensive they are, I'm sort of shocked that the show isn't any longer than this.
² Chrysanthemums -- at least the bigger spider-mum types -- elicit the same feelings in me as peonies. Maybe worse. When I was in high school, while we were living in South Texas, it was apparently the fashion for boys to give their girlfriends these enormous corsage-like things at Homecoming time, which usually had one or more spider mums, plus like a mile of ribbons in the school colors, and glitter, possibly sequins (?), photographs, this whole gigantic production. (I swear to you: I remember one girl's Homecoming thingie very vividly because there was a cowbell included. A cowbell!) With the ribbons and everything, they usually stretched down to the floor, or almost to the floor, the girls wore them all day, and I never really understood the purpose. Unless the purpose was just to let everybody know that they had boyfriends. They weren't even single-day things, necessarily; I don't remember whether people wore them every day for a week, or if it just seemed like that because different girls were wearing them on different days for a week. It was one of those bits of culture shock I never understood or even asked about.
I assume (hope?) it was just a South Texas thing. It might have even been a South-Texas-in-the-late-80s thing. I mean, this was also the period when all the girls were trying to get their bangs to look like a wave cresting a foot above their heads, and a lot of them wore dresses and skirts from time to time with two-foot wide decorative bows sewed on the back.
Somehow only the Homecoming flowers seemed strange to me at the time. Tall hair and bows the size of bald eagles didn't strike me as peculiar until after I'd been out of school for a while. Fashion, I suppose.
³ Mainly the problem is that with the previous camera, I had a much smaller range of options. Basically I could shoot super close-up, kinda close-up, or far away, and I could do it with or without a flash. I mean, there were other options, but they rarely worked, so I didn't bother. The new camera, though, will let me darken or lighten the whole picture, and has a separate thing for sun, clouds, incandescent light, three different kinds of fluorescent light, plus the really-close, close, or far option. I can change the pictures after uploading them, somewhat, to adjust the color for occasions like when I have it set to sunny and it actually should have been set to fluorescent #2, but -- this is tedious to do when it works, and it doesn't always work. And red or purple things in super-bright sun always turn out badly and non-fixably no matter what the settings.