Wave Hill is such a bounty of great design as well as plants, and more bountiful still because so many of the plants are so established, so mature, so settled in. For someone who is "just" now creating his lifetime's garden (OK, 14 years and counting), seeing how impressive my often-small often-young plants can become is heartening—no thrilling—indeed.
Here's Paeonia lutea, literally Yellow Peony, living up to its name.
It's a "tree" peony, a shrub, not a perennial. And unlike the perennial peonies...
...yellow is a common color in tree peony flowers. And these flowers sure are small, too, at least for a peony. Flowers that are common and small: what's to love? The sensational foliage.
The leaves are large, even a bit tropical and palm-frondy, and point energetically upward. Remember also that tree peony flowers—nash, damn, dag-nabbit—are twice or thrice as short-lived as perennial peony flowers. A couple of days, a week tops, for the entire show, and then you're looking a just leaves for the rest of the season. (And yes, just sticks for the entire winter.)
A tree peony with fantastic foliage, then, is a garden godsend.
This bush wasn't labelled (as far as I could see, that is, without getting on my knees and, gulp, looking shamelessly up its skirts), so I'm thinking it's "just" Paeonia lutea, not the even-more-ferny-leaved cultivar I have, Paeonia lutea 'Ludlowii'.
But with these leaves, and on this impressively-sized bush, this tree peony should be on everyone's must-have list.