PEONIES
Mary Pratte
by Janet Uren
Twenty years ago an aspiring student gardener named Mary Pratte helped her horticulture professor lay out and maintain a magnificent sweep of garden for a house in Rockcliffe Park.
Twelve years ago she and her husband bought that house and Pratte dedicated herself to building the perennial garden. Today her bravura display of peonies stops flower lovers dead in their tracks
Resident expert: Mary Pratte, a former president of the Canadian Peony Society, has dedicated much of her career as a gardener to learning all there is to know about peonies. As a teacher and lecturer, she now shares that knowledge and passion.
It's a fine summer morning in the garden. Sunlight pours down a long green sweep of lawn, and a broad perennial border - fully 100 feet long - proclaims the exuberant height of June. Clumps of irises - dusky purples, lavenders, corals, and soft butter yellows - weave extravagant taffeta frills into a bright background of poppies, roses, and, densely patterned foliage.
Before long, a jostling, gaudy crowd of lilies, delphiniums and bee balm will shoulder the irises aside, followed in time by the autumn perennials - asters, chrysanthemums, and fall aconites.
For that's the glory of a perennial border in all seasons. "They love the garden. They challenge us," says gardener Mary Pratte. "They say, 'Why did you change that?' 'What's that?' ' Where did the hydrangeas go?' "She rewards them for their interest by leaving pots of divided plants at the end of the drive. "People take them, and they come back later to tell us how they're doing." For a few brief weeks in June, though, it's Pratte's bravura display of peonies - big and small, white and red, pink and yellow - that stops flower lovers dead in their tracks. Few gardens in Ottawa offer such a rich display.
2,000 years ago, the peony got its name from the ancient Greeks. A myth says that Zeus
took pity on a young medical student, Paeon, who had made his divine teacher, Asclepius, jealous. The god protected the boy by turning him into a flower. The peony turns up in Canadian history too, when settlers took it West in covered wagons. Clearly, this is a flower that inspires affection and loyalty. Plants are passed through families from generation to generation, and when people move, peonies are often uprooted and taken along. Admirers willingly put up with the flower’s faults — a sometimes heavy head, for example, that droops without support, and petals that fall everywhere — and breathlessly extol the virtues of colour, texture, shape, and scent.
Pratte, a former president of the Canadian Peony Society, is one of those devotees. She has dedicated much of her career as a gardener to learning all there is to know about peonies, and today, as a teacher and lecturer, she shares her passion. She also consults — for example, with Les Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens in the Gaspé — to help identify unknown peonies. Detective-like, she searches out rare and lost varieties. And as a member of the Friends of the Farm, she helped — on behalf of Agriculture and Agrifood Canada — re-establish and build on an extraordinary collection of peonies at Ottawa’s Central Experimental Farm. “I worked with George Vorauer to establish a new collection of peonies,” she explains. “We wanted to bring back peonies that had died or been lost from previous collections, as well as introduce a number of fine Canadian-bred peonies. Finally, we wanted to build a new Saunders collection.” (A.P. Saunders was a son of the farm’s first director and an important hybridizer of peonies. The farm now has examples of more than 100 varieties that he developed.)
Today the world boasts more than 5,000 varieties of named peonies, with more being added every year. Though there are 35 species of wild peonies, most hybridizer's work with only one — the single white Paeonia lactiflora. “Saunders was unusual,”says Pratte, “in using anywhere from 30 to 35 wild varieties. The result was a collection that includes many different forms and subtle colours — cherry, coral, pale pink... Saunders was also important in that he kept meticulous notes on 17,000 different plants.”
Border crossing:Though the peonies are the central attraction in Mary Pratte’s garden during their six-week bloom period, her perennial borders are designed to flower all year. In this late-spring photo, for instance, tulips and irises are among the flowers providing vibrant hits of colour to complement the early peonies
PROFILE
Mary Pratte’s life as a gardener began as a five-year-old, when her father was posted to England.
“The garden we inherited with our house came with a gardener,” she remembers. “I
followed him around for years, asking questions, and that’s where I had my first lessons in
gardening.”
The lessons resumed many years later in Canada. Having recently retired from teaching to
devote herself to family, Pratte was restless. Though she had as yet little practical
experience as a gardener — just a few house plants, pots on a balcony and, later, a small
yard in Toronto — botany had always intrigued her. After moving to Ottawa in 1988, she dared to try something new. She enrolled in horticulture at Algonquin College. One of her teachers was David Goodfellow. “He had enormous influence on me, and when the time came for a placement, I asked if I could join him in his work,” she remembers. Goodfellow had recently laid out a magnificent sweep of garden for a house in Rockcliffe Park, and his
aspiring student gardener helped him maintain it. Today, by astounding coincidence, Pratte
now owns that house and garden. It must have been fate. The Prattes had been living in Manor Park for some years, and it was there that Mary had begun resurrecting and redesigning her first real garden. “But I wanted something more,” she says. “I had always yearned for a real perennial border, something with sweep and flow.”
In 1996, the couple decided to move and started to search. “We looked and looked and found nothing, and eventually we gave up. That’s when our agent called and said: ‘Come and see one more house. I think you’ll like it.’ And that was it. I knew the house. It was where I had worked with David Goodfellow. We always say that we didn’t buy a house, we bought a garden.” It was the beginning of an adventure that has since engaged Mary Pratte in countless hours of joyous labour. “Some days I go out, and there are so many things to do, I hardly know where to begin,” she says. “I start working, and I can’t stop. Suddenly the streetlights are coming on, and it’s night. Still I can’t stop. I like gardening at night, when everything is quiet and I have to feel my way around. Gardening for me is about using all the senses.”
Some of the fascination comes from sensual delight. The rest comes from making friends with the floral inhabitants of her garden. “You have to learn every plant,” Pratte explains, “know its being. Take it out of the pot. Don’t be afraid of it. Examine its roots. Understand the plant. That’s what David taught me. ‘Look at it,’ he used to say. ‘Understand what it does, how it works. Then you’ll know what to do with it.’"
“Some days I go out, and there are so many things to do, I hardly know where to begin. I start working, and I can’t stop. Suddenly the streetlights are coming on, and it’s night. Still I can’t stop. I like gardening at night, when everything is quiet and I have to feel my way around. Gardening for me is about using all the senses”
In striving to know and understand her garden, Pratte is not afraid to play favourites. And among all the horticultural splendours that surround her, she has chosen to give her heart to the peony. That flower, in myriad varieties, contributes a remarkable range of colour and form to her garden in June — everything from delicate singles in creamy whites and yellows all the way to great many-petalled globes of colour that range from burgundy to snowy white. These are the “voluptuous doubles,” the gardener explains, whose weighty blossoms — the despair of every gardener after a rainstorm — were once specially bred as cut flowers.
Pratte knows every one of her peonies by name and pedigree. Here is the Paeonia mlokosewitschii, she says — otherwise known as ‘Molly the Witch.’ “This is the only true yellow herbaceous peony. It’s a very early bloomer and has a distinctive leaf shape, with bluey-red leaves. It also has decorative seed pods that open in fall to show red and blue-black seeds.” Next door to Molly is another early bloomer, ‘Le Printemps,’ whose peachy-pink blossoms were introduced to the world in 1905 by a famous French hybridizer. In this garden, they rub shoulders with the dark red ‘Henry Bockstoce,’ which has the unusual virtue of standing bolt upright even in the rain. ‘Nice Gal,’ similarly, “is not a flopper.” ‘White Innocence’ is the tallest peony of all — a towering plant covered with single blossoms that are a pure, virginal white and deceptively delicate in appearance. In the centre of the flower, seed pods cluster tightly like a decorative green button. And so it goes.
There are more than 100 varieties of peonies in Pratte’s garden, and she is anxious to introduce them all as the individuals they are. The Itoh peonies, for instance, were bred by a Japanese horticulturalist. They’re a cross between the tree peony, which holds its buds on a woody stem, and a herbaceous variety, which buds underground and is thus less vulnerable to frost. The Itoh peonies combine the best traits of both. On the one hand, they have the delicate, exotic leaves of the tree peony and huge blooms that look as though they’re made of crumpled tissue paper; on the other hand, they have the hardiness of herbaceous varieties. Other peonies (Paeonia tenuifolia) have leaves like asparagus plants. One has a spiky halo at the blossom’s heart,where stamens have developed into petaloids: this peony has a charming name: ‘Do Tell.’
One of the poignant pleasures of the peony flower is the brevity of its life. Some varieties bloom early and others late, so the season as a whole lasts perhaps six weeks. Individual plants, however, flower for little more than a week. Thus, whenever a peony explodes into blossom, it demands to be seen and admired, quickly and intensely, before the flowers bow and fade and the petals fall. By July, it is all over. Until next year. That’s the thing about peonies. Year after year, they return — like old friends — to our perennial delight.
Peonies on parade:
1 Pratte says she can never do justice with her camera to the blooms of ‘Henry
Bockstoce’. The dark red peony has the unusual virtue of standing bolt upright even in the rain
2 ‘White Innocence’ is the tallest peony of all — a towering plant covered with single blossoms that are a pure, virginal white and deceptively delicate in appearance
3 Though the entire peony season lasts just six weeks, when conditions are right, the blooms are spectacular
4 The ‘Do Tell’ peony boasts a distinctly spiky halo at the blossom’s heart, where stamens have developed into petaloids
5 ‘Nice gal’ is a classically pretty peony with petals that fade as the flower matures, creating the bicoloured effect seen in this photo
6 Pratte has more than 100 varieties of peonies in her garden, including this ‘age of gold’ tree peony with its creamy lemon blooms
Photography: Mary Pratte(1, 5, 6); Marc Fowler/Metropolis Studio(2, 3, 4)
Note: This article was originally posted on the Canadian Peony Society Blogger Blog on Feburary 15, 2009. As part of a preservation project, these posts are now being re-published on the CPS website. All credit belongs to the original author, indicated when this information is available.