Peonies

Peonies are to me like peanut butter sandwiches are to some people – comfort ‘food’.

As a gardener, they were my first loved plant –not only because the blossom is impressive, but because I successfully transplanted them from my childhood home. The plants in these photos are over fifty years old. When these beauties bloom each spring with their top heavy heads, my mother’s attention to them are fond memories.

One of my favored contemporary poets, Mary Oliver:
Peonies (an excerpt)
the flowers bend their bright bodies,
and tip their fragrance to the air,
and rise,
their red stems holding
all that dampness and recklessness
gladly and lightly,
and there it is again ---
beauty the brave, the exemplary,
blazing open.
Do you love this world?
Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?
Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden,
and softly,
and exclaiming of their dearness,
fill your arms with the white and pink flowers,
with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling,
their eagerness
to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are
nothing, forever? ~ New and Selected Poems