Tree peony

By mid-afternoon it the weather was clearly not going to improve, so I resigned myself to a damp walk round the village and wrapped up accordingly. I took the camera, hoping the tulips along the road might be nicely decorated with raindrops - which they were - and I was sure there would be flowers in the hedgerows and gardens. I enjoyed it all a lot more than I expected: I hadn't walked around the village for a while, and many gardens were full of new colour, with frothy blossoms, emerging perennials and bright bulbs blazing out of the damp haze of mist and drizzle. Then, in Duck Street, I stopped short and gasped: in a tiny front garden in a row of terraced cottages, a gloriously flamboyant, exuberant, flounced pink tree peony was bursting out of its border in front of the window. The blooms were not quite the size of dinner plates - soup bowls perhaps - with complex centres of vivid orange-yellow stamens. Some were gently opening buds, petals like layers of bright tissue paper around a fragile gift; more fully open flowers had softly gathered and scalloped petals falling like dancing skirts underlaid with bright petticoats. Their glamour and glowing enthusiasm eclipsed the gloom of the afternoon and I walked home with a huge smile to google tree peonies. They don't sound too hard to grow...