Rejoicing in a profusion of peonies

When I moved to my farm in Bedford, N.Y., I vowed to rethink the way I had always gardened. I wanted to plant differently, to create masses of color and masses of a single plant type, as I never had before.

My beloved 6-acre garden at Turkey Hill, in Westport, Conn., had been planted fully and well. Influenced by Claude Monet and his colorful, lush garden in Giverny, France, and by Helena Rutherford Ely and her extraordinary garden in New Jersey, I had planted orchards, perennial borders and large flower beds.The Bedford gardens, which I began about four years ago, gave me many more acres to deal with and a landscape that seemed to devour plants and shrubs and trees at a ferocious rate. I had to create a new type of design and method to deal with areas instead of beds, with more mass plantings than carefully planned borders, and groupings of specific colors rather than a riot of color, as at Turkey Hill.

I began planting in masses, focusing on specific plants, not the overall garden. After one great event took place, like the blooming and fading of the azaleas, another mass of color would appear elsewhere, such as the herbaceous peony garden, leading the eye from one place to an entirely different location.

My new mentors were Jacques Wirtz, a landscape architect, and Elizabeth von Arnim, the author of books such as "Elizabeth and Her German Garden" and "The Enchanted April." Both designers understood vistas, quantity and massing in a way I never had.

My peony garden has been quite successful. I decided to concentrate on pink varieties because I had read that von Arnim had a circle of pink peonies, 300 feet across, that her little girls adored.

I wanted plants that had a long blooming period and strong and vibrant cultivars, and I hoped to include a range of pinks and blossom types, including single, semidouble, double and anemone.

To delineate this garden of 11 double rows of 22 varieties of peony, I have planted a double row of round and oval boxwood around the vast beds. I expect this to grow into an undulating wall, guaranteeing that the bed will remain a focal point on the property and accentuating its importance in the landscape.

So many peonies! I could not wait for them to bloom. Even that first year, the bounty was much more than I had expected. So much more that I planned a peony party for the following June to celebrate an even better year. And on that warm night, despite the competition of delicious food and lively guests, the peonies were definitely the stars.

Adapted from Martha Stewart Living.

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