I am worried.
Have just transplanted three tree peonies from my parents' old garden in Victoria into mine. This is not the optimum time of year to be transplanting peonies. Ideally, this should have been undertaken in the fall.
Ah, well. When co-ordinating schedules between myself and the often-absent owners of my parents' house to connect in Victoria, beggars cannot be choosers.
I was really only interested in reclaiming one of the tree peonies, which has been in my extended family since the 1930s. It was a wonderful, and thoughtful, bonus to procure my mom's two peonies as well.
Tree peonies are unique. They can live for hundreds of years with the result, there is usually a long historical story attached to each plant.
Such is the case with this peony passed down through my family from a great-great-uncle to a great-uncle to my mother and now to me.
You see, this peony originally resided in a Chinese mandarin's garden. It was given to a sealer named Capt. Victor Jacobsen, who lived at 507 Head St. in Victoria, sometime during his 15 years of sealing off the coasts of China and Japan in the 1880s to early 1900s. (The heritage house is still standing.)
Many of the sealing boats of that era also carried the precious daughters of the Chinese mandarins out of China to Canada and the United States. This was during the Boxer Rebellion (1898 to 1901).
I have not uncovered any definite proof of Captain Jacobsen's involvement in the smuggling of mandarin daughters out of China to Victoria or even Canada. But it would seem to be so since this tree peony was definitely gifted to him by a mandarin during one of his trips to China and subsequently planted in his garden on Head Street.
Now, as I can lay no claim to being a descendant of this wayfaring captain, you may well ask how this peony should have found its way into the garden belonging to a great-great-uncle.
And here in the telling of that story is the reason my fingers are crossed my three tree peonies will survive, despite their off-season transplanting.
This part is where the family connection to this peony gets a little convoluted ... hope you can keep up!
Captain Jacobsen had commissioned a brother-in-law (Charlie Olmstead) of his daughter, Eva Marie Sweeney, to restore the 38-foot Tilikum, which had been acquired by the local Thermopylae Club in the 1930s.
The Tilikum was originally a dugout canoe carved from a huge red cedar tree by the Nuu-chah-nulth in the early 1800s and sold to a Captain Voss in 1901. Voss moored the Tilikum in Oak Bay while he made alterations, added rigging for sails as he outfitted the old canoe to attempt a circumnavigation of the world.
Due to a lack of funds with which to pay for the restoration work on the Tilikum, Captain Jacobsen offered Charlie "something from his garden" and Charlie picked the Chinese peony, which he proudly displayed in his own garden.
(Note: The Tilikum is now on display in the BC Maritime Museum in Victoria.)
Confusion ensued when Charlie's brother-in-law, Steve Sweeney, who was also Eva Marie's brother-in-law, saw the peony in Charlie's garden.
Thinking Charlie had stolen it, Steve uprooted it when Charlie was at work and took it home to his own garden. Charlie retrieved it when Steve was at work and took it back to his garden. And darned if Steve didn't steal it back a second time!
Thinking to fix Steve for good, Charlie snuck back into Steve's garden, dug up the peony again and then planted it in his uncle's garden ... my great-great-uncle ... where it thus remained undiscovered by Steve.
Now, I have lost the timeframe as to when all this transplanting of the Chinese peony took place as my great-uncle Jim, whose story this is, sadly passed away in 2011, just shy of his 102nd birthday.
But I figure, no matter the time of year, if this remarkable peony could survive all that seesawing between gardens, I am sure it stands a chance of adjusting to its latest upheaval.
Fingers are crossed.
Leslie Cox co-owns Growing Concern Cottage Garden in Black Creek. Her column appears every second Friday.