garden transplantation experiments

i inherited a lot of plants from the previous owners of my house
and now i want to move them around. there's a lot of
conflicting advice on the internet about when it's safe to transplant
various plants and when it isn't so i'm just trying stuff
and logging the results here.


hostas


hostas simply do not care. as long as the destination is suitable
you can happily transplant them whenever you like with little risk
of damaging the plants.


peonies


i love all the peonies in my yard but they're placed
very haphazardly. there's conflicting advice on the internet
about when it's safe to transplant them so i'm going to
try a few things and report on the results.

one consistent recommendation that i intend to follow is
to wait until the plants have finished blooming before transplanting.
i didn't have the time or energy
to transplant my peonies in the spring
so i have no problem following this rule.

another more contentious suggestion i've seen is
that you should wait until later in the year to transplant so the
plants have a chance to store energy during the summer.

this is the claim i want to test.

this year all my peonies were done blooming in june so
i'm moving one at the end of june, right at the start of summer
then i'll move one in august, in the middle of summer
and i'll move the last one in september, just before fall

june 28, 2025

i moved the first peony from its previous home next to a fence.
it turned out to be two plants so i kept them together and 
planted them both in a new bed in front of my garage.