A peony too popular

Peonies have supplanted carnations as the most popular cut flower. At first this sounds good news, for peonies bloom with a most delicate structure and smell. The trouble, though, is that florists’ flowers gain a reputation of which the garden kind are innocent. So the rose – its bud and blossom without compare in your own garden – becomes, bunched and swaddled in cellophane, sterile and unmovable in its tight curls. A similar affliction overtook the carnation, which became for the florist an unyielding flower-head, as if produced by a 3-D printer. As for the alstroemeria, once known as the Peruvian lily, its virtue became its undoing: never wilting, even after weeks in water. The peony runs this danger: that its soft and dropping petals may be wrestled by horticulture into static perfection, mummifying in the vase.