Val Bourne has searched to find a harmonious trio for peony beds and found it with bleeding hearts

I have a very cold garden at Spring Cottage, as I keep mentioning, but roses and peonies do very well here. Both need the cold temperatures to flower well, although this year we have had a milder winter. I grow about 30 different named Paeonia lactiflora cultivars and they are full of bud and promise at the moment.

I mix them with roses and I use a floribunda named Rose ‘Champagne Moment’, the Rose of the Year in 2006.

I have constantly struggled for a third partner to accompany them, for I like to plant in combinations of three. But a recent visit to The National Trust’s Buscot Park, near Faringdon, gave me an ideal companion, the tall, pink and white bleeding heart we used to call Dicentra spectabilis, now renamed Lamprocapnos spectabilis. It graced their peonies and roses to great effect.

I’ve never been a great fan of this pink and white giant, always preferring the pure-white ‘Alba’, or the more-diminutive forms of bleeding heart such as the red-locketed ‘Bacchanal’. However the archingly elegant habit of L. spectabile was perfect with the more-upright peony and rose foliage. The bronze and orange- tinted foliage and rhubarb-pink stems of the bleeding heart also toned well with the peony and rose foliage too. I’ve woven several along the rose and peony borders in the shelter of the cottage. I haven’t used it further from the house, because the soft fleshy stems of this showy plant can collapse if frosted.

I can hardly wait for my peonies to flower and I grow a full range of colours. Among the first are the Molly the Witch (P. mlkowsewitschii) and P. lactiflora hybrid ‘Claire de Lune’ and the deep-red ‘Buckeye Belle’, which has old cottage garden peony in its blood line. Both have become Chelsea stars and both are about the flower. However most of my lactifloras are soft-pink, deep-pink and white and they flower in late-May and June. Many have French names and were bred for the cut flower markets of Paris and peonies do make tremendous cut flowers. Among my favourites are ‘Dr Alexander Fleming’, a fragrant double-pink peony with superb red-backed foliage.

America is now the centre of peony breeding and they’ve added brighter colours to the range, partly because pale peonies fade in strong sunshine. To get extra colour (including red, cream, yellow, coral and peach) American nurserymen crossed P. lactiflora with different species. ‘Coral Sunset’ (Wissing — Carl G. Klehm 1981) used the red P. peregrina ‘Otto Friebel’ and the double-white P. lactiflora ‘Minnie Shaylor’ to produce a coral. Wissing had previously bred ‘Coral Charm’ in 1964, a peachy peony with an orange centre, but it took him 20 years. I’ve just planted both and hope they thrive.

The price of peonies is enough to make a gardener wince, because they cost anything from £12. However P. lactiflora cultivars are long-lived and worth their price. A good peony should live for 40 years or more and if you choose early, mid and late varieties you can have peonies in flower for four to five weeks at least, before their sumptuous coppery foliage takes over.

It’s a complete myth that peonies cannot be moved. This old wives’ tale goes back to the 1st century AD and was perpetuated by Pliny the Elder who was in awe of this powerful plant. Blinded by the peony’s magical properties, the Ancients didn’t want to mistreat them and suffer consequences. After all they named this plant after Paeon, physician to the Gods. You can plant potted peonies through the year, but the time to move peonies is October, when dormancy begins. The secret of success is to replant the plump tubers a mere two inches below the soil. Go any deeper and they sulk forever because they need cold feet to instigate flower buds.