...and the ancestral peonies
Here's a photo of a dense little collection of flowers planted during the last two years on the south end of the house:
I planted the grape hyacinths and the white lilies (the green thingies coming up behind the hyacinths) a few months after we moved back into the house in 2007. You may remember me grousing about moving three cubic yards of dirt at the time...
The darker stems in the foreground, though, are what I'm calling the Ancestral Peonies. They are transplants, dug up with my own little hands, from the home of The Ritual Artist's parents. They, in turn, transplanted these same flowers from the home of The Ritual Artist's maternal grandparents thirty years ago. I think the originals may have been planted in Everett, MA, by her mother's mother's mother at the turn of the last century.