Michigan Peonies

Peonies are long-lived perennials famous for their enormous, many-petaled blooms and light, rosy fragrance. A well-established plant can live for decades and bloom more generously every spring — the clump in your grandmother’s yard may genuinely be older than the house.

Michigan is peony country, and there’s proof just down the road: the University of Michigan’s W.E. Upjohn Peony Garden, in Ann Arbor’s Nichols Arboretum, is one of the world’s premier collections — nearly 800 plants and around 350 heirloom herbaceous varieties bred in the 1800s and early 1900s. Roughly 100,000 people make the pilgrimage to see it bloom each year, usually from late May into early June, the very window our farmers are cutting. Peonies flourish here for a simple reason: the plants need a long, hard winter chill to set their buds, so Michigan’s cold is a feature, not a flaw. You can visit the U-M peony garden to see heirlooms much like the ones our growers tend.

Peonies are cut at the “marshmallow” bud stage — soft and showing color but not yet open — and timing that cut is an art. Our member farmers walk their rows daily to catch each variety at exactly the right moment, then hold the buds cool, so a locally grown peony reaches you fresher and lasts far longer than one trucked across the country.