Mixed peonies: a bouquet that rearranges itself
Most flowers look the same on the fourth day as on the first, only tireder. Mixed peonies do something else: the balance between the colours moves, because the varieties in the bunch do not open at the same speed.
The bouquet you photograph on the evening it arrives is not the one standing there at the weekend.
Day one
Everything is closed and the heads are roughly the same size, so the mix reads as a pattern of dots. Dark varieties look darker than they will ever be again, pale ones still carry green in the outer petals, and the whole thing is tighter and smaller than the catalogue photograph led anyone to expect.
This is the correct state for a flower that has just travelled. Open peonies do not survive a box.
Days two and three
The single and semi-double varieties go first. They unfold within a day, double in width, and suddenly the mix has a centre of gravity it did not have before, usually somewhere off to one side.
Colour shifts along with size. Reds lighten as the thinner inner petals come into view, coral varieties begin fading towards apricot, and whites finally lose their green, so the proportions of the palette change even though nobody has touched the arrangement.
Dense double heads are still working through it at this point. They are the slow half of the bunch and the reason a mixed bouquet holds together for a week rather than three days.
Days four to seven
By now the early openers are wide rosettes, heavy enough to lean out over the rim of the vase, and the late ones have caught up to roughly where the first group was on day two.
The bunch is at its widest here, often half again the size it was on arrival. Anyone who chose the vase to fit the delivered bouquet discovers the problem at this stage.
Then it ends in the order it began. The first flowers to open are the first to drop, and it is worth pulling them out as they go rather than waiting for the whole thing to finish together, since the remaining heads look better with room around them.
What follows from all this
Choose the vase for the end state, not the start: wide neck, wide base, and enough water that the level does not drop out of sight overnight. Peony stems are thick and stiff, and a mixed bunch has more of them than a single-variety one at the same visual weight.
Say what date matters when you order. A mixed bouquet for tonight is built from heads that are already breaking, and one for a wedding in four days is built almost entirely from tight buds with two or three open flowers for reassurance.
If the recipient in Nice is away for a couple of days after delivery, mixed peonies are a poor choice, because the middle of the week is when they do their best work and nobody will be there to see it.
