Seeing Red, Happily

I would have loved to have taken a picture of our new peonies all out along the house blooming in red, pink, and white. But with massive storms overnight last night, all of the established peonies that were already blooming have collapsed from waterlogging. (The ones at the front of our walk kind of look like the greenery is dragging a bunch of white dish mops on the ground.)

The new ones are smaller, so their blooms aren't as heavy, which means that they didn't get totally pummelled last night. In fact, the red one that was budding and had just started to open, actually did open today.

And, happily, it truly is red. Most of the time, "red" peonies are actually a dark pink, verging on kind of a purple. But we found these this year, and - I'm happy to say - this one is not at all pink.

We debated leaving it outside, since it's the only bloom of that color that we're going to have this year. But, as we got home from dinner and realized that the next storm was rolling in, we opted to cut it so that we could enjoy it a bit longer.

It looks like this (unfortunately, that one petal is down, but check out the cool color):

Hopefully next year we'll have more of them - and fewer storms destroying them just as they bloom.