I love plants with flowers that smell good. I even brought a plumeria cutting home from Hawaii to see if I could grow it here (San Francisco) (all legal, by the way, cutting was sold at the airport with licenses and permits intact).
I have read, however, that both lilacs and peonies require winter weather (below freezing? at some point) in order to come back and bloom the next year. However, the absoluteness of this requirement seems a bit up in the air.
So, please expostulate what you know on this topic. My USDA planting zone is 10B; my Sunset Garden Book planting zone is 17. I have a back yard that gets lots of sun and is generally protected from the wind, which means that it doesn’t get very cold in the “winter” (I put that in quotes because this year January-March was warmer than April-May so far). There is a wooden fence along the back of the garden space, chain-link fences along the side, and plenty of open space if they don’t like being up against a barrier.
My experience:
I am in Southern Calif. (Ventura County)
I mail ordered Lilacs from back east to get the ones that had fragrance.
The first couple years I dumped ice water on them to simulate freezing.
I stopped, mostly because I forgot.
They are now 10 years old. I get fragrant blooms, albeit smaller than I’d like.
I tried peonies but they didn’t make it…got “rusty” or “burnt”.
I am 11 miles from the ocean.
Thanks, someone else also suggested dumping ice to simulate freezing. Maybe it’s only important for the first few years.
I talked to a peony expert after I made that post, and she said that they should grow here if they can get at least 6 hours of sunlight per day, have appropriate soil, and not too much water. So I’m going to try it.
I may re-think the lilac issue as well, as I have a perfect place for a bank of lilacs. Do you remember where you mail-ordered yours from?
I think it was this place…
Both plants like a lot of sun. I lived in a house that had lilac bushes in shade and they are not very happy plants.