Photo Credit © Copyright D.A. Brown My all time favorite flower -ever- are these peonies, which were growing on the side of the garage when I bought my house. Since then, I've determined they are "Festiva Maxima" a rather 'common variety' of peony, but to me they are extraordinary - they are absolutely stunning for floral arrangements. Pristine white with spontaneous rippled cranberry ribbons of color through out the interior of the flower. They're flamboyant, sumptuous and burst with LIFE.
With this camera, I am unable to focus on the details, but I hope you can feel the essence of the blooms !!!
"It is the month of peonies—the week, the day, and the hour of peonies. In late March their red asparagus-like shoots began to push toward the intensely blue spring sky with its scudding clouds. Through April and May the stalks gained height and turned green; buds formed and swelled tantalizingly. Ants crawled over the veined globes with gathering excitement, and now, at last, comes the hot day after a warm rain when the flowers open. And we are blessed, we are undone by them....This year the plants exceed every expectation. Suddenly they've come into their full adult beauty, not strapping, but statuesque—the beauty of women, as Chekhov says, "with plump shoulders" and with long hair held precariously in place by a few stout pins. They are white, voluminous, and here and there display flecks of raspberry red on the edges of their fleshy, heavily scented petals. These are not Protestant-work-ethic flowers. They loll about in gorgeousness; they live for art; they believe in excess. They are not quite decent, to tell the truth. Neighbors and strangers slow their cars to gawk...I suppose if I had to declare a favorite flower, it would be peonies, and here I find myself in the moments just after their great, abandoned splurge. They seem like the diva in her dressing gown after the opera—still glistening, but spent. "Death is the mother of beauty," the poet Wallace Stevens tells us. Maybe never again will all the elements conspire to make another such marvelous moment of flowers.
I'm glad I wasn't away from home or, as the Buddhists say, asleep."
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