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Barbara’s Favorite Flowers: Peony

A plant that is familiar to many is a favorite to Barbara, especially the ones at Willow Creek and Southern Mansion. Here’s why!

My Peony Patch at the Willow Creek Vineyard includes several hundred heirloom peonies, salvaged from a historical West Cape May peony garden on Landis Ave and mixed in with other fabulous hybrids. I remember seeing the “Peonies For Sale” sign off of Broadway for years and buying dozens of them from a delightful little lady in her 90’s. Her son maintained the Peonies for many years later, and finally he offered the plants for sale.  Needless to say, I purchased the entire lot and established them in my Vineyard gardens.  Now as these are old-fashioned peonies, they are more in the anemone, or semi-double style, as compared to the more outrageous, modern, hybridized varieties, but their delicious sweet scent and beauty are unforgettable.

These fleeting, over-blown, decadent blossoms are the stuff of dreams and bridal fantasy.  These are flowers that are purely over-the-top. A huge bouquet of peonies in a crystal vase next to your bed or on a marble counter in front of your bathroom mirror is exquisite. Peony season is short-lived in early May; the Chinese, or tree peony, blooms first. Tree peonies originated in Asia and can live hundreds of years. Certain colors and varieties are in such high demand that they command millions of dollars. The herbaceous peony has a soft stem that comes up from the bare earth every year, but it shares the Asian ancestry and delicious blossoms. Peonies are also very popular motifs in classic Asian art and Museum quality tattoos. They are known as the King of Flowers in China.

Peony flower type varies tremendously as they become more complex in their arrangement of petals. The flower types include Single, Japanese, Anemone, Semi-Double, and Bomb-Double. Herbaceous peonies die back in the winter and regrow in the spring, while tree peonies lose their leaves in winter, but leave woody stems.

I hope you enjoy the gorgeous peonies at Southern Mansion and Willow Creek Winery as much I do!

Barbara’s Favorite Flowers: Platycodon

Platycodon grandiflorus, is a great hardy perennial for your garden border. Here is why Barbara loves it:

She reproduces and reseeds well, which is always an added bonus (it produces lots of babies to gift your gardening aficionado friend’s with). In the family Campanulaceae (like several of my favorite waterfall and Canterbury bells), but she is the only member of the genus from the Greek meaning broad bells.

A Native of East Asia, she bears big, blue flowers, which start off in lovely swelling buds that for all the world resemble wonderful puffy balloons.

Medicinally, the root of this particular species is used as the base for many age-old natural, and commercially prepared remedies for colds and coughs. You can also use them in salads and soups!

I hope you enjoy this beauty Platycodon as much as I do!

Barbara’s Favorite Flower: Queen Anne’s Lace

Queen Anne’s Lace Daucus carota, a wild carrot, is a wonderful flowering biennial that is native to Europe, but naturalized all over North America. Here is what Barbara has to say about this wild carrot:

Related to carrot (Daucus Carrota) you can eat the root when young, (it tastes and smells like carrot) but it gets nasty and woody as it matures.

Women have used the seeds from Daucus carota for centuries as a contraceptive, the earliest written reference dates back to the late 5th or 4th century B.C. appearing in a work written by Hippocrates. “The seeds, harvested in the fall, are a strong contraceptive if taken orally immediately after coitus.”  I can not speak to the efficiency but it certainly is interesting historically.