Without knowing more, it's difficult to know what exactly is going on, but some suggestions: do you feed your tree peony?--after a few years' growth in the same spot, they benefit from feeding since they really do take a lot out of the soil. Another issue we have here is moles and voles even though peony roots aren't supposed to be tasty; those varmints have eaten straight through several of our tree peonies so we also dose the peonies with Mole Rid when we do our feeding. Botrytis infection can also reduce bloom but is relatively easy to prevent. Surrounding bushes and trees may have grown to point where they're shading the peony too much in the year preceding. And lastly, sometimes tree peonies just don't send up that many blooms and there's no outward cause you can point at, especially when they've been allowed to grow out their wood without any pruning.

Your winter damage, I'm assuming, is in the form of broken or bent branches (the snow was incredible this year). A number of my tree peonies were injured in this fashion, but I'll take the silver lining: a number of the bent branches now touch the ground, so I've scratched them a bit and buried portions of the branches in the hopes of layering them and getting new plants within a couple of years.

Anyway, as long as the bush appears healthy and is receiving good light, I'd chalk it up as a feeding issue and give it a bit of feed now and in the autumn.

I too have less bloom buds than last year but the reason for this was that it was so warm so long last fall that buds started breaking dormancy. Then instead of frosts that would have helped the plants we had a hard freeze that zaped many of the buds. On my favorite Fen Dan Bai rather than being weighted down with buds it only has two.

Hi ozzysboy,
What do you use to feed your Tree Peonies? I hope now is still the right time to do it. Please send me an email (I have other questions to ask).

Thanks.