It’s May, which in my corner of Utopia means peonies. We have the great good fortune of living on the corner of Fragrant Farms, who grow peonies for market — blooms and plants to ship around the country. So on one side of my cabin are corn or soy fields, and the other side, acres of peonies. In May, they are ablaze and the colors and scents are staggering. We are repeatedly invited by Mrs Jane Owen, the owner of this glory, to pick as many full blown blooms as we please (the buds are shipped out, the full blooms are past that) and so the house, as I write this, is delicious with the un-reproducible scent of pure peony. Bouquets everywhere. When I say un-reproducible, I so wish that you could have peony-in-a-bottle for November, but of course that would make it less sublime when May rolled around again.

As I am a rather pathetic photographer, I have only shown you the deep pink peonies as the white ones don’t perform so well for my camera. So just as there are fields of this magenta, there are other blocks of palest pink, white, and candy pink. Heaven.