April 30, 2025
The peony plant is in its third year. By now it should be developing deep roots, eyes forming along the original tuber as it spreads underground to form multiple stalks, shooting up into an abundance of blooms. This plant is a dark red color I adore, the deep maroon that formed the backdrop of our wedding colors, the perfect foil for the swoonworthy fluffy pale pink Sarah Bernhardt peonies that fill Instagram feeds and Trader Joe flower shelves. Sure, those ballet tutu peonies are gorgeous, but they really pop with the foundation of the dark red flowers I’m trying to grow here.
But it’s planted in difficult soil. (The best I could find in our small lot, but the best of the slim pickings still isn’t great.) It’s in the tree box outside our house, the small rectangle of dirt surrounded by sidewalk in which grows an ungainly Sycamore, dappling the sunlight which filters down to the hungry plants from mid-April to mid-November. The area gets frequent traffic from pedestrians exiting cars, from neighborhood kids like our own four-year-old and her next door bestie who careen down the sidewalk in gleeful obliviousness. Our box is a lonely island of cultivation amidst a line of weedy vacant spaces up and down the block. Most things planted here seem to die, which is probably why most neighbors have given up trying, settling for, at most, an annual dumping of mulch that is soon dispersed by pets and children into jagged edges scattering the sidewalk.
It’s also been a place of disruption. City workers swept through last year, removing the sidewalk brick work along the length of the block and reconfiguring the perimeters made wavy through years of thaw/freeze cycles with more precise geometry. It is, I know, a general service to a sidewalk thrashed through with overgrown tree roots and loose bricks, but the immediate short-term effect was to kill a number of my plants, caught in the digging up and brick-laying crossfire.
This peony bush has survived—but wears the stress, more stunted than hoped for. Its sisters, purchased and planted around the same time a few falls ago, four in a row in our lone sunny spot, the far side of our fence in what might technically be said to be our neighbor’s lot, proudly wave many long-stemmed peony arms to the western sun. Meanwhile, this one sits squat in our tree box, a compact bush with, at the three summers mark, a single tall stem lurching heavenward. The peony cage I jammed into place around it a month ago with such hope: heretofore unnecessary. The bush hasn’t grown high enough to peak through yet—except this one long stem, fat peony bud bulging on top. I have my eyes on this singular prize.
One day as I’m walking toward our car, I notice my precious survivor peony stem laying limp, sideways on the dirt, a large gash in the stem toward the bottom. One of those careening pedestrians, perhaps one of mine, has evaded the menacing peony cage meant to discourage such accidents and crashed against this plant. My singular flower, on the verge of death.
I’m angry, muttering curses upon the evil passerby who destroyed my meager attempt at beauty, knowing full well it may have been my own child. But the anger I vent is only the visible fruit of what I really am: gashed in two like this stem. It’s just a flower, OK, logical brain trying to talk me down. But this small loss is like a microcosm of broader destruction of beauty and goodness we’ve witnessed and mourned, and in this little world I’m in charge of tending, feels like the breaking straw. First USAID and now my beautiful survivor peony? Nothing gold can stay! Everything is meaningless under the sun! (Logical brain is not having much of an effect just yet.)
But upon inspection I notice the cut isn’t total; it is still connected to the mother plant but only just. What if I prop it up re-align the severed stem with the bush, sheltering the remaining connection? Could the plant somehow transfer via these vital few remaining lanes of traffic sufficient water and nutrient to keep this bud alive long enough to bloom?
I’m not too tired of caring, not too jaded of hope, to try again in this tiny sphere I tend.
Twenty-four hours later the stem remains propped up, bending lamely against the metal cage. It’s not resplendent with vigor. But it’s not dead! The tightly encased peony bud is just a bit more open than yesterday. It looks, I decide, like the mostly-closed, just-hinting-at-color peonies shipped for weddings. As my own did eleven years ago, buckets of snug little globes atop glossy foliage arriving arrive with instructions to soak in water and keep in a cool place til showtime. They didn’t disappoint. If those could unfurl on command, maybe this one will too.
I reach down to the gash in the stem and trim on a slant just above the broken place, severing it with one neat, sharp clip. I further slash up the stem vertically, creating an inch of two adjoining poles, like a small lean-to, exposing more surface area of the thick, woody stem to the water I plunge it into next.
With no wedding to save this potential boom for, and nothing more to lose beyond the dream of the lovely dark peony I remember from my own wedding, there’s no need to refrigerate. I stick it in a favorite antique store find, a stately gold single-stem vase, and place it ever so hopefully on the guest bedroom bedside table, where my mom, flown in from the west coast, will be staying tonight.
It’s not much to look at, and she barely notices—uncharacteristic for her, a master gardener. Ah well. I supply her with more obliging flowers and plop the golden vase down on my work desk, where it stands, abandoned through a weekend.
Monday morning it looks unchanged. Well, maybe the bloom has engorged a bit, a slightly plumper, ball, albeit still tightly enclosed, Or maybe just wishful thinking.
Tuesday it’s definitively bigger, fat and squishy, pink-red sheen flaming through. It I picked it at golf-pong ball stage, yesterday it was a ping pong ball, and today it’s a tennis ball.
Maybe this will work!
Wednesday morning I enter my office early to pray as always, and there on the desk, backlit by a shimmering peach sunrise in the distant sky, is a brilliant dark red peony, splashed wide open, oversized shiny smooth petals encasing a fluffy central cloud.
There was no guarantee this would open—or that the stubby plant it came from would reward me with blooms at all. It’s been through disruption, been trampled on, undernourished in a neglected corner of a well-trafficked tree box. And even a blooming peony in all its splendor fades into compost. The triumph, if it comes at all, is short-lived, a shimmering moment of glory rewarding a year of patience.
But this flower does survive, and it is glorious now. This flower, in its shocking deep red, it’s immensity of light-catching petals, feels unquestionable worth the time and care it has taken to get here, worth all the time and words to share my joy with you. Just because it cannot stay doesn’t mean it isn’t praiseworthy.
I don’t hold back my gasp of delight.
