A Note on Peonies
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 hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden
to gather the white and pink flowers,
their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling,
their brief eagerness
to be wild and perfect for a moment before they are
nothing, forever?
- Mary Oliver, “Peonies”
I grew up on what had once been my great-grandparents’ dairy farm. By the time I arrived, the cows were gone, most of the barns had collapsed into memory, and the fields had surrendered themselves to bramble and second-growth woods. Even the old Victorian house eventually wore a practical skin of vinyl siding. Yet, to the patient eye, traces of the farm persisted everywhere: stone walls threading through the forest, rusted implements sleeping in the surviving barn, the faint grammar of agricultural life still legible beneath the land’s slow return to wilderness.
Among those remnants stood my great-grandmother’s peonies.
They grew beside the chimney—woody, extravagant, tender. Even as a child, I knew not to mow them down. I understood instinctively that they were more than flowers. They carried devotion within them. They connected my great-grandmother to something fleeting yet perennial: beauty that demanded tending precisely because it would not last.
Perhaps that is why peonies have followed me through my life with such force—and why I amble sometimes barefoot through my own gardens here in Vermont to inspect twenty-something peonies scattered throughout. For their beauty is inseparable from impermanence. They arrive in lush abundance, impossibly alive, only to collapse days later into browned petals and heavy stems. In their “honeyed heaviness,” they seem to express the paired truths Nabokov named so perfectly: life is beautiful; life is sad.
This morning I walked my usual loop through the Formal Garden at Hildene. I came to Hildene for many reasons, but I underestimated how deeply the gardens—and the peonies especially—would inspire me. Last week, an arborescent peony opened stubbornly through cold rain. Now its myriad cousins stand in every stage of becoming: tight green and burgundy fists, swelling buds lacquered with sap, extravagant blooms already loosening themselves for bloom.
There are more than twenty-five varieties at Hildene, unfolding within privet borders designed by Robert Lincoln’s daughter, Jessie, to resemble stained-glass windows. Each flower seems to possess its own temperament: some restrained and architectural, others reckless in their abundance. I find myself visiting them daily, waiting for the moment they open fully, even knowing that fullness is already the beginning of their disappearance.
Perhaps that is what they teach.
My mother turned ninety this week. When she moved into her retirement community, she brought my great-grandmother’s peony with her, carrying it forward like a living heirloom. A few months ago, she asked whether the plant should someday be divided among my siblings and me. I told her it was doing just fine where it was, as was she—division was a conversation for another day.
This Sunday we will gather to celebrate her 90th birthday, and I am bringing her another peony for her garden—this one from Hildene.
It strikes me now that this is how love survives time: not by preserving things unchanged, but by tending them as they pass from hand to hand. The flower blooms, withers, returns. The people who planted it disappear. Still, each spring, something rises again from the dark earth—fragile, extravagant, unwilling to last and therefore impossible not to cherish.
Come. See the spectacle; take the time to let it wash over you before the flowers fade.
