You might go to the Garden Watch Dog and check out other people experiences with Van Bourgondiens....

Diann
IA Z5a

Here is a link that might be useful: The Garden Watch Dog

If you want to try a tree peony start going to box stores like home depot, lowes and walmart. Look at what they have received in the small 4x4 boxes. If and that is a big if you can purchase one just after it has been put on the shelf you may purchase a tp for a smaller price. There is no guarantee that what is on the box is what you are actually purchasing. But then sometimes this happens at regular nurseries. Lift the boxes the heavier the container the more likely the plant will live. Plant very deeply. Most of the stem under ground, the plants are generally one year old grafts. Some of the distributors will put a small label either in the bag or in the box as to what the variety is. Please take that with a large grain of salt. Some of the plants have been stimulated to have a bloom or two the first year but will not rebloom until the roots are established and the plant provides it's own food.

Take the plant home plant it and enjoy. Start going to gardens in your area to look at tree peonies and see what is out there. You may change your mind as to what you want to have. You may decide that the one plant you really want at $150.00+ is a bargain vs 20 at -$35.

Hey, I got my first tree peonys at Blains Farm and Fleet in Cedar Falls. Got two of them for $3.00 a pop. Those puppys are alive and well and bloom their little hearts out for me now (took 2 years, tho). :) Oh yeah, they were true to the color and name on the box.... :) I plant a lot of stuff under black walnut trees and I didn't want to invest in an expensive tree peony and then have it curl up and die when I planted it, so... Anyway, they both lived and are seeming to thrive under my black walnut trees...

Diann
IA Z5a

Peony trees just arrived today at my Costco.
For $8.50 a plant I could afford to experiment with possibly mislabeled plants.
Last year I bought 2, 1 died and 1 survived, but I can't guarantee that if I'd bought 2x$50 plants instead, results would be different.
I wouldn't buy anything from Van Bourgondiens regardless of the price, though.

After all the posts I went into Costco this week and bought 3 tree peonies for the $8.50 price. Couldn't really beat it and they seem to have solid roots. I potted all 3 together in a big pot and covered them in the garage. Hopefully I'll have something neat to look at in a couple years. These have 2 stems each.

i purchased 5 tree peonies fron van bourgandien. i am very pleased! they looked awful at first but they have transformed into 4 lovely little baby trees and one even has a bud on it. i say four because one was damaged during shipment (they are mailing a replacement) and is clinging to life. i hope it to be only a season behind the others.

van Bourgondien tree peonies appear to be one year old plants. They will be very small and probably won't flower the first spring. It looks like they are grafted so you should expect blooms on three year old plants, give or take a year. With tree peonies, you are paying for time, especially with the non-grafted chinese type, which may not bloom until five or more years old.

Glad this got bumped to the top again. I thought maybe someone would want to hear how my Costco purchase has gone.
I bought 3 TP's from Costco the end of Feb and planted them together in a big pot kept in garage. I was a little confused about Japanese vs Chinese in my earlier post - the Costco tree peonies were Chinese - don't know what Van B sells. I planted out the Cinnabar Rampart (Zhu Sha Lei) about 1 week ago. When I took it out of the pot it had begun developing new roots - good sign. It had begun to leaf out and looks quite healthy. The nice folks at A&D Peonies in WA had told me to plant it before it leafed out if I could - so tried to hurry to get it in the ground.

Now its covered with a box as the snow is falling and not expected to quit till tomorrow. My favorite nursery told me that peony leaves would freeze on the tips and look uglier than normal if they weren't covered so my yard looks like a warehouse with boxes everywhere on the herbaceous peonies.

The 2 not planted yet are P. Suffruticosa Hu's Red and Paeonia ostii White Phoenix. The P. ostii was a lot later than the suffruticosa's in developing leaf buds and its not as healthy a plant - the stems appear to be largely dead and the new growth is coming from the bottom and from the rootstock. There is a lot of conflicting information on the internet about P. ostii - some say its the easiest to grow, others say its susceptible to diseases and a weak plant. But the picture was pretty! Now I'm waiting for the snow to melt so I can plant out the other 2.

Hi there: I bought a few of the Japanese tree peonies from van Bourgondien about 5 years ago. As far as spring (pretty box, dormant plants) purchases go, they send good plants--bigger than most. In general, I don't plant any peonies in spring, but they settled in well and are doing fine in the garden. That having been said, I did have a suckering problem from their root stocks which was not resolved until they were dug out and the herbaceous roots removed.

If your suckers were hebaceous you did not plant them deep enough. Next time plant at least 4-6 inches of the stem underground. That way the suckers you see coming from the ground will probably be tree peonies. Tree peonies send new stems from the main trunk which can look like suckers. Leave until you see foliage if tree type leave if not remove.

I thought you should always plant tree peonies at ground level? I have a Witchhazel Jelena that has suckered badly and is on my list for surgery. My 25 yr old Corylus contorta started suckering about 2 yrs ago and sending up 6-8 ft straight shoots from the roots.

In any case, its been 5 yrs since I posted the first on this thread LOL and I have 2 of the 3 still alive. The white one died the first yr but only one of the other 2 has bloomed since. I'm sure I'm not giving them enough sun - too crowded in the beds. My Costco has never offered tree peonies or anything that exotic again - just the run of the mill daylilies, clematis, etc

You plant herbaceous and intersectionals at ground level but plant tree peonies much deeper because the plant has to develop it's own roots from the tree peony stem.

maifleur: Thank you for the suggestion, but the suckers were in fact herbaceous. Most of my plants have come from either Reath's or Klehm who use lactiflora rootstocks which can't form adventitious buds, so I'd not had this problem (or, more accurately, I hadn't had this problem often). The van Bourgondien stock was planted with their grafts as deep as I could plant them without completely burying the tree peony buds and by the time I re-dug them had formed quite nice tree peony roots, so removing the mother root wasn't a big setback for them.

I actually have a preference for plants from China rather than from Holland or Japan since they seem to reproduce most of their bushes by division rather than by grafting (not 100% but the majority)--never an issue about the type of suckers from those, and the Chinese varieties generally sucker quite a lot, forming a dense bush quickly.

But the question was about van Bourgondien. Long and short, they're nice plants as far as the mass-produced plants go, with some reservations. The best thing going for them is that they're relatively cheap and at least on a par with other dutch plants you find in decent garden centers each spring.

Solaris Farms has very nice tree peonies and I think reasonable prices they look the best this spring out of all the tree peonies recieved last fall.I see a large amount of eyes and they were not small plants very good size tree peonies.Also Bill Seidl has been working with them on breeding and grafting plants.I already ordered 9 more tree peonies from them for fall.I only ordered three tree peonies and they sent me a bonus plant label seedling#134 which has been registered as Kristy and is in their catalog for $80 this year.Also have Bartzella Itoh for $45 which is the best price I have seen.

For this area the Japanese seem to do better. The chinese take too long to establish. The second year after planting many of the main stems will die making appear you have lost your plant. If I leave thm in the ground new and stronger stems will develop. Leon plants his in amended compost he gets from the local compost site so his always look better than mine.

maifleur: You're absolutely right about the rate Japanese/Chinese peonies take, BUT BUT BUT once the Chinese plants settle in, they are amazing. My Yao Huang and Zi Lan Kui (amongst many many Chinese plants) had been in place for 6 years before producing any significant blooms and the blooms they had produced up til then were very disappointing. But once they got going...holy mama! I thought the flower dimensions the Chinese reported were just hype, but I was just being impatient. And nothing--not a rose, not a daylily, not a hibiscus, tulip etc, is quite as pretty and awe-inspiring as that Yao Huang in full bloom.