(calm music) - Hi, I'm Erik with Landscape Garden Centers and today we're going to talk about peonies.

There's basically three different types of peonies.

We have tree peonies, the intersectional peonies and herbacious peonies.

The differences between 'em, the tree peony is gonna get about six feet tall, herbacious peonies basically are gonna grow from the ground every year but they're also gonna die back to the ground every year and they bloom earlier.

The intersectional peony will grow to about the same height as a herbacious peony but they will only be dying back to about four to six inches.

So there's many different varieties.

The awesome part about peonies is that they live forever.

In some instances, peonies will grow over 100 years old and the funny thing about it is they will grow in the same spot for 100 years and that's the best part of it.

You can find a really nice peony, a really nice peony that's been growing in the same, a certain area and you can actually divide that peony and take that and move that and plant that somewhere else.

The main thing with transplanting peonies is making sure that you keep it, whatever depth it was planted initially is you wanna maintain that depth wherever you're moving to.

Interesting thing about peonies, they want full sun and when I say full sun, they want actually more than just full sun.

They need about six to eight hours.

Six to eight hours is gonna give your peony the opportunity to produce the most blooms or buds and when you have the most blooms or buds, it just turns out to be a gorgeous, gorgeous plant.

It's been around for many, many years and the peonies are really unique from the standpoint is that they're not cheap to buy.

Peonies are not propagated.

They're basically grown from the tubers and the tubers take a long time to grow and you need to have a certain amount of tubers in order for them to continue to grow.

A nursery will actually hold onto peonies for about three years before they're actually ready to be planted or put in a pot like these and then sold to the public.

So there's a lot of investment of time and effort put into these plants in order to make them ready for the public.

Some other interesting facts about peonies is the peonies, their buds will be ready to explode.

They'll be producing nectar and a lot of people will see ants on their peonies and they think, oh no, no, I'm being invaded by ants or this is a bad thing.

No, in this case, the ants are really good.

Ants are actually collecting the honeydew or the nectar from the plant and also at the same time is they're protecting the plant from other pests.

(calm music) My theory is that the ants protect the plant because the plant is producing food.

So the ants protect the plant because it's a food producer.

So basically if anything else comes into there, it takes out the insect.

So ants are a beneficial insect for the peony and that's why you do not wanna be killing the ants off around your peonies.

Something to consider is after your peonies are done blooming is to actually remove the seed head like this one.

Remove it because then that way the effort is put into the foliage, into the root system rather than into the seed heads.

So that is something to consider when growing peonies.

There are many, many different colors.

You can get 'em in white, pink, purple, white and yellow, yellow and white.

There's just a huge amount of variation of the different peonies and different colors.

The ones that you probably see the most of are probably white, more solid colors that have, and those are the peonies that have been around for a long time.

With peonies, as far as fertilization goes is we do not wanna put too much fertilization and you don't wanna put too little.

So basically, just a standard 10-10-10 or something that you use once in a while, you can put that around the plant.

The one thing you don't wanna do is put too much fertilizer in it.

So basically, it comes down to this.

If your plant has been looking good and putting out blossoms, ignore it and enjoy it.

(calm music) I'm Erik with Landscape Garden Centers.

Keep it growing.

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