Peach-A-Licious™ Itoh Peony

Delicious indeed, the unique peach tones of the Peach-A-Licious™ Itoh Peony will be the highlight of your spring garden, for sure. Both bold and delicate, this very rare coloring in peonies is sure to please, with the large, 6 to 8 inch blooms resting on the top of the full, striking foliage of this perennial plant. A hybrid between an herbaceous peony and a tree peony, it brings the frilly beauty of tree peonies to cold zones, and the ability to grow an herbaceous peony to gardeners in hot zones. Growing just like a regular peony, and long-lived, it forms a rounded bush 3 or 4 feet tall and 3 feet wide, and will look great among perennial flowers or in a shrub border. Ideal for your Asian-themed garden too, the stunning beauty of this plant will knock you over, and yet it is very easy to grow. The flowers come in spring, huge bowls of frilly petals surrounding a center of pale-yellow stamens, and the color is a very special shade of soft, peach-pink of great beauty. It doesn’t need staking, because the flower stems are shorter, nestling the flower just at the top of the leaves. It produces side-buds, so the season in extended for several weeks.

• Gorgeous peach-pink blooms are a very rare color in peonies
• Striking jagged foliage looks great when not in bloom
• Good tolerance of both heat and cold, so it can be grown across the country
• Just as easy to grow as a regular peony, and lives for decades
• A special hybrid between a tree peony and an herbaceous one

Plant your Peach-A-Licious™ Itoh Peony in a spot in full sun, or, in hotter zones, in a place with a little afternoon shade if possible. The soil needs to be rich and moist, but also well-drained, so prepare a good planting hole, adding plenty of good-quality compost to the soil. When planting, check that the point where the stems meet the roots is no more than 1 inch below the final soil surface – deep planting means waiting years for blooms. Allow a couple of growing seasons for this plant to develop and bloom well. Remove dead blooms, leaving all the leaves, and cut down in late fall, after the foliage has yellowed. Mulch over the entire plant with 2 inches of good compost at the same time. Deer and rabbits don’t eat it, and it generally has no pest or disease problems – as easy to grow as any regular peony, and just as cold-hardy. Grows well in hot zones too, where other peonies fail.