What style is my peony garden?

I’ve been thinking lately about garden styles. More specifically, I’ve been wondering: what style is my peony garden?

It should be an easy question to answer. After all, I’ve spent years creating it, adding borders, moving plants, experimenting with combinations and, of course, collecting peonies.

And yet, I find it surprisingly difficult to give it a name.

It has something of an English-garden feel. There are generous borders, winding paths, layers of planting and an informal sense of abundance. But it isn’t really an English-style perennial garden in the traditional sense.

Classic English borders often rely on repetition. A limited number of plants are repeated in generous groups or drifts, creating rhythm and cohesion across the border. The eye moves through the planting as a whole.

My garden works differently.

With more than 400 peony plants and hundreds of individual cultivars, I simply cannot look at a border without noticing the plants themselves. A particular peony may catch my attention because of its colour, its flower form, its breeder, its history. Or simply because I waited years to see it bloom.

The individual plant matters.

And that, I think, is where the idea of a collector’s garden comes in.

It began with peonies

The funny thing is that I never set out to create a collector’s garden.

I set out to create a peony garden. When I started the garden in 2017, the idea was fairly simple: I wanted a place where my peonies could grow together and where I could enjoy them during their relatively short flowering season.

The garden was also inspired by a place I had known for many years: the Flowery Brook at the Montréal Botanical Garden. I was drawn to its informal, naturalistic quality, the way the planting follows the contours of the space rather than imposing rigid lines, and how one area leads naturally into another. That influence stayed with me when I began shaping my own garden.

But I wasn’t trying to recreate the Flowery Brook. I was simply carrying forward something I loved about that garden: the feeling of moving through a space that unfolds gradually, with plants and views revealing themselves along the way.

But even with peonies that bloom at different times, the flowering season is relatively short. Once the flowers are gone, the garden remains, and I wanted it to have a reason to enjoy it throughout the rest of the growing season.

So, little by little, I began adding other plants. Irises extended the season and brought colour before and around the beginning of peony bloom. Lilies added another layer of interest as summer progressed. Daylilies followed, then phloxes, which now help carry the garden well into late summer.

At first, I wasn’t collecting these plants in the same way I collected peonies. I was thinking about the seasonal life of the garden.

I wanted something to look forward to before the peonies, something to enjoy while they bloomed, and something waiting for me after the last peony had faded.

The garden needed to keep giving. And it did.

Then the collector in me took over

Of course, the consequence was predictable. Once you start paying close attention to irises, you discover an extraordinary number of them. The same happens with lilies. And daylilies. And phloxes. And even more: baptisias, alliums …

Before long, the collector in me had expanded beyond peonies. What had started as a way of extending the garden season gradually became another kind of collecting. Different cultivars began to interest me for their own qualities, just as the peonies had.

And so the garden changed. Not because I had drawn up a new master plan, but because my curiosity kept growing. This is probably one of my garden’s defining characteristics. It has evolved through fascination rather than through a rigid design concept. I see something I love, learn something about it, find another one that intrigues me, and somehow there is eventually another plant in the garden.

A cottage-garden spirit

There is also something undeniably cottage-garden about the way the garden has evolved.

Peonies, irises, lilies, daylilies and phlox all belong comfortably to that tradition of generous, floriferous perennial gardens. There is abundance rather than restraint, informality rather than strict formality, and a succession of flowers rather than one carefully controlled moment.

But again, I hesitate to call it a cottage garden. A traditional cottage garden doesn’t usually contain quite so many individual cultivars of the same plants. Mine is far too much of a collection. Perhaps the better way to describe it is that the garden has a cottage-garden spirit, but a collector’s heart.

I like the generosity of a cottage garden, but I also want to know what is growing there. I want the names. I want the stories. I want to remember who hybridized a particular peony and when it was introduced. I want to recognize an iris because I have grown it for years. I want to notice the subtle difference between two cultivars that, to someone else, might look almost identical. That curiosity is part of the pleasure. And I want a little more structure.

Not everything has to be repeated

This has also made me think differently about garden design. I admire beautifully designed English borders. I love the effect of repetition and mass planting. There is something wonderfully sophisticated about seeing a plant repeated throughout a garden so that it becomes a visual thread. I’ve started trying to achieve this with flowers along the edges.

But that isn’t the only way a garden can create interest. In a collector’s garden, the plants themselves can be the reason for the planting. Instead of repeating one cultivar twenty times, I may want twenty different cultivars. That does create a different visual language.

It can be more varied, sometimes less immediately cohesive, but it also invites a different kind of attention. You don’t simply look at the border as a composition. You stop. You look closer. You recognize something. You discover something you haven’t noticed before. And perhaps that is why I have never been entirely satisfied trying to fit my garden into one established style.

The experience … and the garden moments

There is another word that may actually matter more to me than style:

experience.

In a recent article in Gardens Illustrated, titled The 9 golden garden design rules experts use to create beautiful gardens that feel good, the British garden designer James Scott explains: “In practical terms, design layout and flow are foundational. My early sketches always prioritise how a space will be experienced – how you move through it, where you pause, and how different areas connect both visually and physically.”

“A garden should be deeply personal,” says another garden designer, Michelle Brandon, adding, “I never compromise on ensuring it reflects the people who use it. That might be a tree that evokes a meaningful memory, or a space designed around a passion or ritual.”

No contest, my garden expresses my passion for peonies. The fifteen borders are sinuous rather than straight, their curves drawn quite simply with a garden hose on the ground, a method I wrote about in another post. I like the informality of those curves, and the way they create little shifts in perspective as you move through the garden. The borders and lawn paths gradually reveal one view after another, rather than presenting the entire garden at once.

It is not really a garden that can be understood from one viewpoint. Perhaps that is why I sometimes struggle to find the right photograph for it. A photograph can capture a beautiful peony, a combination of plants, a border, or a particular view, but it can never quite capture what it feels like to walk through the garden.

Indeed, the garden is experienced one moment at a time. A glimpse of an iris appearing above the foliage in early summer. The first peony opening after days of anticipation. A particular cultivar that catches my eye because I know its name and its story. A shaft of evening light falling across a border. A fresh rain on the sculptural lilies taking over after the peonies have finished blooming, followed by daylilies and, later, the soft colours of phloxes.

These are the moments that make the garden memorable. Some are planned. Many are not. They may differ from one day to the next, and certainly from one month to another. This is perhaps what I find most difficult to convey in photographs. A photograph freezes one garden moment, while the garden itself is a succession of them.

You walk in and see one thing. You turn a corner and discover another. You notice a plant you hadn’t seen the day before, or suddenly see a familiar one in a completely different light. You sit and enjoy the ambiance. The garden keeps changing, and so does the experience of being in it.

I’ve also come to realize that these moments are not mine alone. The garden now receives visits from garden clubs and groups of fellow gardeners, and I enjoy watching them experience it for the first time. They stop at different plants, notice things I may have become accustomed to, ask questions, and sometimes see connections or combinations that I had never consciously noticed.

There is something wonderful about that.

A garden that began as a very personal collection has gradually become a place to share. And perhaps that is another part of what makes it a garden of experience: it creates moments not only for the person who planted it, but also for those who walk its paths, pause along its borders, and discover something for themselves.

A garden that is still becoming

Looking back, I think the most interesting thing is that I never consciously designed the garden according to any of these ideas.

I didn’t decide that I was going to create a collector’s garden.

I didn’t decide to create a cottage garden.

And I certainly didn’t begin with the idea of creating a garden around the experience of moving through fifteen borders.

Those things emerged over time.

The peonies came first. The desire to extend the season brought the other perennials. My curiosity turned those plants into their own collections. The garden grew, the borders multiplied, and eventually the physical space itself became part of what makes the garden special.

So, what style is my peony garden?

Perhaps the answer is that it doesn’t belong entirely to one style.

It has an English influence, particularly in the way the borders and paths shape the space. It has a cottage-garden spirit, with its abundance and succession of flowers. But at its heart, it is a collector’s garden, where individual plants have identities and stories that matter.

And above all, it is a garden meant to be experienced, one garden moment at a time.

But I don’t think the garden is finished. The next stage will be less about adding plants and more about refining what is already there.

I want to create a greater sense of enclosure and a stronger continuity between the peony garden and the rest of the property. The garden has grown into its own space over the years, and now I’m thinking more about how it connects with everything around it.

Then there are the finishing details: decorative elements, architectural features, furnishings and the small adjustments that will give the garden a greater sense of cohesion and bring its different spaces together.

After years of planting and expanding, perhaps this is the stage I’m looking forward to most: stepping back, looking at what is already there, and deciding what it still needs.

The planting may be nearing maturity, but the garden itself is still becoming. And perhaps that is what I love most about it: not a style imposed from the beginning, but a garden that has emerged gradually from what I love to grow, how I want to garden, and how I want others to experience it.