Weren't the peonies beautiful this year? I can remember the peonies in my grandfather's flower garden. While I adored the fresh cut peonies and liked helping to arrange them in vases, I didn't like being the one who had to cut them off the plants. That's because they were covered with ants ... and ants made my skin crawl.

Despite the ants, peonies are "perennial" favorites that reward us with beautiful blowsy flowers. In my opinion, peonies are taken for granted because they don't need much care and have few pest problems. These beauties provide large, sometimes fragrant, blooms every spring. The flower colors include the traditional white, pink, dark pink, red, magenta and maroon, but breeders' and collectors' efforts have resulted in some very lovely lavender, yellow, apricot, coral, salmon and even orange-flowered peonies.

There are two main types: the regular garden peony (Paeonia hybrids) and the tree peony (Paeonia suffruticosa). The garden peony is a herbaceous perennial that dies back to the ground in the fall. It grows back from its crown and fleshy roots in the spring. The tree peony is a deciduous shrub that drops its leaves in the fall and regrows from its branches in the spring, just like other hardy deciduous shrubs.

There is also a newer type of peony called an "intersectional." This is just a fancy name for a hybrid peony that's the result of a cross between a tree peony and a garden peony. The result is an intersectional peony that dies to the ground each fall, but has flowers and leaves similar to that of a tree peony. Where most tree peonies are not hardy in the coldest northern climates, the intersectionals are hardier. There's also an interesting fernleaf peony (Paeonia tenuifolia) with fernlike leaves. The fernleaf peony has single or double deep red flowers and the plant is smaller than most garden peonies. Because they're difficult to propagate, fernleaf peonies are rare and expensive. You'll also find that some of the newest peony cultivars and hybrids can be very expensive, as much as $100 or more per plant!

* Marianne C. Ophardt is a horticulturist for the Washington State University Cooperative Extension Office in Benton County.