Several species peonies seem to have difficulty with the wet Winter/Spring. Resulting in quite a few losses. Sometimes I have several plants of species, most often when I receive a dozen seeds and I get quite good germination. Often it can be seen that some plants within the same species are better than others at withstanding our local climate, which is of course rather obvious, but it does offer prospects for selecting ‘strains’ more adapted to our climates. Anyway, it’s not always the roots that decay, but most often the shoots themselves, or at least those are the first to succumb. Here are some images of Paeonia broteri of which I have some five plants, grown from wild collected seeds in Central Portugal. You can see it’s the shoot that didn’t make it, whilst the root is still fine. As there are already some new very small buds on them, they’ll probably recover next year, mayby I can move it to a better spot which is drier still. There’s also an image of another plant of this species, same age, that doesn’t seem to have the same issues and which grows next to it in the same spot.