This is the Peony’s favorite time of year, so naturally they sent you a card.

If your peonies routinely get botrytis mold in the spring, it’s likely that your weather is often cool and damp. In this case, you might want to spray the emerging foliage and buds with an organic fungicide every year as the plant grows. For an occasional browned bud or leaf, just clip those off and throw them away. 

The main reason that established peonies don’t flower is that over time the plants around them have grown taller and the area has become more shaded. If you think that this is the case for your plants, put on your calendar to move them in September or October. Peonies want to grow in at least 6 hours of dead-on sun that include the noon hour. In such locations they can remain undisturbed for years. A Paeonia seldom needs dividing, which is why you don’t often see them offered in garden club plant sales. 

You may read that peonies are fussy about not being buried too deeply, but frankly I think that this has been over emphasized by garden communicators, including myself. By all means try to have the crown of the plant (the top of the root where the stem comes up) about two inches below the surface of the soil, but don’t stress about this. Know that newly planted small peonies take at least three years to mature and turn magnificent, and if your older plant isn’t flowering, look hour by hour during a sunny day to see just how much sunlight it’s receiving. 

This is one of my favorite varieties, ‘Festiva Maxima’. It is very fragrant.

If rain is predicted, don’t stress about staking the flowers, pick them. And when the first flowers on a shrub finish, deadhead them promptly so that the side buds open. 

It was an “old school” practice to remove the side buds early in the season so that the first flower was larger, but most people these days think that more is better than bigger. 

This group shows the variety of peonies that I grow. There is Sara Bernhardt, Whopper, Festiva Maxima, Raspberry Sundae, Cora Stubbs, and an unknown dark pink variety that my friend Steve Kaufman shared with us in 1983.