Beyond the Vase: Proven Techniques for Long-Term Peony Storage

July 1, 2025

Categories: Post Harvest

Long Term Storage

Before attempting to store peonies for long term, first and most important, get all the heat out of the stems.  We have a high-volume cooler with extra fans etc. (not for reds, more later on reds) We hold our peonies in the coolers for at least 24-48 hours before attempting long term storage.  Carefully inspect all the stems making sure there is no botrytis, no bugs, and generally all the stems are in the best shape possible.  One bud with just a touch of botrytis or any disease, can ruin the entire storage container.

 

There are many ways to store peonies

When I first started farming peonies, I spent two seasons in New Zealand working on several farms.  These guys are some of the best peony farmers in the world.  Their season is November December. Most of their varieties were white and red for the Christmas market. The did  grow others varieties, but in smaller quantities.

One of the owners had a family wedding scheduled in January. They stored their peonies in what they called ‘the coffins’. These consisted of wooden boxes with wood lids, and yes, they did look like coffins, a bid morbid. They made sure they were dry and healthy, then sealed the boxes up and didn’t open again until ready to use. They did very well. However, most of us don’t have ‘coffins’ lying around.

While I was there though, I was introduced to what they called azalea bags.  These consisted of a very large permeable plastic bag.  Again, making sure the peonies were in the best condition, they place the heads and about 8-10 inches of the stems in the bags and loosely sealed them, laying them on the cooler shelves.  This method is very successful for the shorter storage, maybe 2 weeks. These bags are now readily available and labeled permeable bags. You can use them over and over with good sanitary practices.

At our farm we store our best conditioned peonies in our regular shipping boxes.  No plastic bags, no newspapers between layers etc.  We carefully lay them in the boxes tightly but careful not to bruise them.  We put the lids on and label them and stack them in the coolest areas of our coolers. We don’t open the boxes until it’s time to ship.  We do inspect all the buds before shipping.

We’ve been very successful holding them up to 3 weeks, even keeping the foliage green and healthy. Although our goal is to schedule our marketing and shipping to keep our peonies moving as quickly as possible to the end user, sometimes those darn Festiva Maxima and Duchess de Nemours just keep on producing and we do have to store them.

I should add right here, even under the best of circumstances, often the foliage gets a bit ugly, looking dry etc. but when plunged in water, the leaves plump right up and are beautiful.  We make sure we have notes in all our boxes about how to take care of the peonies with several sentences about the ‘wilted ‘foliage. I can just imagine what a bride feels when she opens her box of peonies for her precious occasion and sees a box of wilted foliage.  Don’t forget the instructions.

I’ve visited Holland several times, getting educated on how they harvest and prepare their roots for shipping since I sell and ship a lot of their roots. While there I also spent time observing how they process the flowers.  Everything there is done assembly line mostly by machines.  But they do have a long-term storage program that is catching on in the USA now too. They are very large rubber/plastic boxes with a gas system that allows months of storage. I’ve witnessed when the boxes were open and have mixed emotions about this option. Of course, some botrytis escaped notice in a few of the boxes and almost the entire box of many, many hundreds of flowers were rotting.   That wasn’t pretty.

Some of the Alaska farmers were concerned that the new gas boxes would allow Holland to hold their peonies into the Alaska harvest season causing serious competition. And that has happened a bit, but these peonies stored in this fashion have very short vase lives. They are still OK though for a one-day affair such as a wedding, so they can infringe on the Alaska market.  Being a bit prejudice, I believe there is no substitute for fresh cut flowers of any kind versus those that have been stored for any length of time. Also, I think long stored flowers do not have the best fragrance.

Varieties to Store

There are varieties and colors that store better than others.  Generally speaking, the smaller flower heads such as Duchess de Nemours and the lighter colors seem to store longer and easier.  Reds are always a challenge, either short term or long term.  We were lucky to have someone from Holland visit our farm and help us figure out how to store reds short or long term.

We have a separate cooler just for reds now.  The temperature is maybe 1 degree warmer, and we don’t put them in our rapid cooling cooler but cool them down slowly.    We cover the reds and keep them covered until they are ready for packing and shipping.  We’ve experimented with several covers and have settled on burlap. Reds bruise very easily.  We do not store reds long term except for a ‘special’ customer maybe.  We layer the reds with a newspaper between each row for shipping.  We do not like to store reds.