A context for the peonies

I can't believe I'm doing another post about peonies as a gardener devoted to plants that work for a living (eg. pollinator and wildlife-friendly and edibles).

But there's something rather remarkable about these peonies;  perhaps the secret garden aspect of discovering them under an overgrown chokecherry, their obvious age, and the remarkable size of the flowers.  Peonies, like ginkgos, have stories that are compelling, and if I count the ants that visit the extrafloral nectaries of the herbaceous types, and maybe these too...., and maybe something collects the pollen on them.  They're all single-flowered.

A few more photographs this morning put their scale in better context than yesterday's post.

Peonies to the right of the garden shed

Flowering on new shoots