Staking And Supporting Our Peonies - May 2025

A couple weeks ago, I read this post on Martha Stewart's blog titled: Staking the Herbaceous Peonies - and realized that we're coming up quickly on peony season in our garden.  Martha uses (of course she does) stakes that she designed herself and has a huge number of peonies on her property.  We, well...don't.  

Over the years, we've ended up with five peony plants.  Two in front (IB2DWs) and three in the back (Kitchen curved bed).  After the first five-or-six years in our new garden, we finally had our first *real* peony season back in 2023.  Why did we finally get blooms?  Because I moved the peony plants we had on-hand from the back of the yard to closer to the sun/patio.  And, I moved a couple up to the front yard where they get full sun. 

Last year (2024), we had even more peonies.  Here's a post showing a full vase of Sarah Bernhardt pink peonies that I cut from one of the plants.  

However, due to their small-size, I haven't really thought much about supporting the peonies and just let the heavy blooms sort-of flop over before cutting them off. 

But, back to that Martha Stewart post:  it motivated me to try creating my own support set-up with stakes and twine.    Here are a few photos showing the two types of frames I created:  some with four posts, and some with three.

Below is a three-post support system that I used on a smaller peony.  

I originally bought these stakes and twine to build out some support for the dahlias, but since those haven't gone in the ground yet, perhaps I can re-use these for when the dahlias need support later this Summer.