Mr J’s Peony

Some years ago, I took over from a friend who was helping a very old man with his garden. Mr J had moved to Dorset on retirement and built an award winning garden from scratch. The way he’d planned out the garden from a bare plot round a bungalow was amazing, and he’d then filled it with unusual shrubs and perennials. By the time I knew him, he was in his nineties and the only gardening he could manage was some pottering in the greenhouse. His daughter begged him to move nearer the family but he was obstinate, telling me that if he left the garden, ‘I’d be dead in mumfs.’ I’m sure it was love of the garden that kept him going. He kept an eye on it by whizzing round on his mobility scooter in the most terrifying manner. Once, he managed to tip himself into a hedge; luckily he was wearing his panic button but he still had to wait a while to be rescued.

He had a man in to do the ‘cuttin’’, as he called it, and me to be his weeding, watering and tidying slave. Goodness, he was an old bossy boots but I got fond of him and missed him when he died, aged ninety six. Unlike many keen gardeners, he wasn’t very generous about giving away roots or cuttings, claiming that if he gave away everything people asked for, he’d have nothing left. I did manage to get some seed from a lovely tree peony he had. I was successful with the seed but in my old garden I already had one tree peony and couldn’t decide where to put another. So I just kept potting it on into ever larger pots. I brought it with me when I moved, then when I’d cleared a whole bed of rubbishy stuff and was ready to replant it from scratch, in went the peony at last. Ten days ago, I found this.



( and now )