A few years ago, I traveled to Seattle for a friend’s wedding, and had an awakening. I’d never paid much attention to peonies before, but that weekend, they were everywhere: beautifying the bridal bouquet (you can see them if you click the link and scroll through the photos), artfully arranged (so that they looked perfectly un-arranged) in a vase in the guest bathroom of the home where I was staying, and spilling over fences in neighborhood gardens around Green Lake. Suddenly, it seemed peonies were everywhere, in home decor, clothing, poems, and strangely enough, in Alaska.
