Luscious Garden Peonies

It's hard to select favourite plants in one's garden. Like most gardeners there are so many plants and flowers that offer pleasure in their colourful presence, their texture, their fragrance, their architecture. Perennials like digitalis and delphiniums with their regal and towering floral presence are compelling in their presence. And the garden mulleins, slender-stalked with delicate blossoms so unlike their wild cousins.

And the spectrum of hostas, with the added gift of their floral displays rivet my eyes with pleasure. Their shapes, the fullness of their mounding habit, their various textured and coloured and shaped foliage send me into into an ecstasy of appreciation. Heucheras too, with their various coloured leaves, their mounding presence, their delicate floral sprays are special garden plants.

And the roses, who doesn't love roses, in all their manifestations, from shrubs to climbers, to tea roses, the miniatures. Their colours of white, yellow, orange, pink, red and mauve, with some able to turn from orange to pink, from pink to white, and others beautifully and delicately petal-striped sends the avid gardener into raptures of blissful appreciation. Standard roses, grafted onto the slender trunks of apple trees require such care in our harsh winters, yet they demand their place in our gardens.

Day lilies with their slender, lancelike foliage, sending their floral displays aloft gladden our hearts. The Asiatic lilies and the Tiger lilies with their ladder-like leaf stalks, their large and fragrant flower heads send us into a tizzy of olfactory delight. The sight of irises, the blues, the purples, the yellows, the whites and combinations of all sturdily aloft, above their sworded leaves flag our attention.

And then there's the peonies, the tree and herbaceous peonies, cut down to nothing in the fall, swiftly making their presence known again in early spring until in a few short weeks they're ready to burst into full bloom, with huge, luscious flower heads, single, double or triple petalled. And the divine fragrance, following one about in the garden, wafting its way into the house is not quite to be believed.

Challenged only by the heady fragrance of lilies-of-the-valley, of the Asiatic lilies, of French tree lilacs.