One perfect peony

The thing that I love best about Spring and Summer, is the way that gardens, which have spent all Winter looking brown and boring, are suddenly filled with splashes of colour.  Red and blue buds poke through hedges and paving stones, sweet scented pink and white roses tumble from trellises and window boxes are filled with the deep pinks and velvet reds of geraniums, so bright that it is hard to believe they are real.

 To a chaotic gardener like myself, each new bloom is a pleasure and a surprise.  I never remember what I planted  last year.  I don't plan for flowers that bloom at different times, I don't plant flowerbeds with the tallest flowers at the back grading down to the smallest at the front. I don't think about what colours would look good together.  I just see flowers that I like and put them in the ground and hope that they will grow. And each year, if they reappear, my joy at seeing them again is not just the result of their colour or beauty or scent but is filled with the pleasure of a reunion, of meeting old friends who you had almost forgotten about but now you have met them again, you remember how much you liked them.

But there is one flower that I always wait for amongst the colourful chaos of our garden. One flower that, for the short time it blooms, seems to hold the rest of the garden to ransom. Nothing seems to me to be as beautiful as our peony. When it opens its rich, red petals, I always breathe a sigh of relief. It has been growing here since we first bought our house and the small wilderness that was its garden.  If flowers had been planted, they had long ago been strangled by weeds and overshadowed by knee length grass and bits of rubble. But when we had tamed the grass, waged war on the weeds and kicked aside the odd chunk of brick, I was amazed at the flower I found, nestled in the shadow of the crumbling shed. Its deep red petals formed perfect swirls of colour. Against the peeling green of the shed and hay-like brownness of the grass,its beauty seemed almost luminous.
 In the house our newborn son was crying and our 2 year old daughter was demanding 
" more milk." But I remember standing in front of that flower and for just a moment the exhaustion of sleepless nights and relentless demands that come with being a parent, disappeared  There was no epiphany. I wasn't suddenly filled with inner hope or enlightened courage but just knowing that something so beautiful could survive despite the odds, made me think that we could too.
When I asked my gardening guru neighbour Gill what the flower was, she laughed.
" That's a peony," she said, " needs replanting though. Look at those roots! And it needs more light."
So with her help, I replanted it in a better place. It was the first planting  I did in our garden, the first change I made ( after cutting the grass ). And it did feel symbolic, as though by replanting a beautiful flower I had taken the first steps towards replanting our lives in our new home.
And so I will always feel linked to my peony.  I will always wait anxiously for it to bloom. Each year I watch as the spiked red edged shoots break through the earth, hold my breath while the strange puppet fingered leaves grow longer and thinner, hunt hopefully for the buds hidden amongst all the foliage.  And there is a lot of foliage!
" Too many leaves," said Gill disparagingly, " that's the trouble with peonies."
And I suppose she's right.  
Once again this year, the leaves have taken over most of the flowerbed but they are nurturing only one flower, deep, deep red against the green.
 But I don't care because it is beautiful and perfect- and one perfect peony is all I need.