A few photos from the Chinese garden excursion.

That Chinese garden looks beautiful, Anya! Too bad the tree peonies were finished by the time you toured.

A few pictures from Buchholz & Buchholz Nursery. I admired beautiful foliage of different trees and bushes.

Some pictures from the International Rose Test Garden.

Wow, both the Chinese garden and Buchholz & Buchholz Nursery are so gorgeous! Love the peaceful landscapes and the beautiful maple trees with the conifers. Just fabulous!

Oh my goodness! Love the roses! Wish my roses bloom as well as theirs.

I don't know how interesting these pictures are. They are from the show and I did not make individual flower photos. (There were so many flowers and varieties!) I attach a few. And I could not take any pictures from the first day where went to Adelman's because my camera's battery died. I got all pictures from Mary so maybe she can post them some day.

Anya, those photos are amazing!! Thanks to Mary Stella too for sending them to you.

Did you see any peonies that you thought that you just "had to have"?

Thanks, LG and Karen! I already had a very long wish list before I went to the convention And I have quite a few in the garden (and a few are coming this fall) that I definitely had to have! So I added just 2 peonies to my wish list not to make it endlessly long - Doreen (such a upright bush!) and Chiffon Clouds (big impressive flowers) and added Fairy Princess to my current order from Adelman's. It was very good to see all these varieties in person, how the whole bush looks, so different than just pictures in a cataloge.

I have Doreen coming from Adelman's, too this Fall after I discovered that the one I bought from Gilbert Wild wasn't Doreen. 🙄

It think it really makes a difference to see a mature clump of any peony.

My gosh Anya. How do you post so many pictures. It is a laborious task for me. I have to reduce the image so it doesn't take so many KB's, then rename then post. My camera (iPhone) takes pictures in the 3600x3600 (approximate size) and are very large for sending.

I do have lots of pictures of individual plants at the show and would be glad to post them if it didn't take hours to prep them for transfer.

What were some highlights at the Saturday night auction? Any exciting peony varieties for surprising prices?

Anya is the expert on that. I was amazed how well she knew all the cultivars even just on sight and what the going 'rate ' was.

Mary, I don't reduce images before posting but I do it on a computer, I don't know if it is different on a smartphone.

Peonyplan, I hoped I could buy something for lower price that on the market, something that I could not afford (New Millennium for example) but organizers wanted to sell items for a fair price or higher so nothing went cheap. For me the auction was waste of time (and it was late in the evening!). That's OK, APS got some money.

These auctions are more about fundraising than getting a deal. My favoriteAPS Auction memory is one of Don Hollingsworth accidentally bidding on "Garden Treasure'.......and winning it for top dollar. Some of you might know Don bred this ITOH and had plenty of it around. So it can be easy to get a little excited about rare treasures offered, get a little bit behind or ahead in the auction list and raise your hand at the wrong time.

Sounds to me there were not really some newly introduced varieties or superb seedlings at the auction?

There were a couple of pretty new varieties, one was 'KC Red'. And seeds.

'KC Red' is a tree peony given to Kris Casey (by Bill) that came from Bill Seidl's garden as a cull, one Bill was passing off as not good enough. Story has it, Bill saw it growing at Kris's later and Bill saw value in it (and later did some breeding with it). It's a nice red on a Lutea Tree Peony.

Easy to get carried away with the bidding. I was looking for species seeds and maybe one or two peony plants. They peonies were both donated and then to be mailed in the fall. Great as would have been difficult to bring home on the plane. Got several packets of seeds to plant ASAP.

I managed to up my own bid a couple of times. An obvious new newbie to bidding. Lol.