I first met Eugenia Harris via instagram this past spring. I was in search of Peonies in Massachusetts and put out a request online, a few people in-the-know of local farmers suggested I reach out to Eugenia of Nicewicz Peonies. She and I had a great connection online and I could hardly wait to visit her and her peonies upon arrival on the east coast! My mother and niece were along for the visit and all three of us had a wonderful time.
Hi Eugenia, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us here on Flirty Fleurs! As we jump into our conversation here, can you share with our readers the details of what Nicewicz Family Farm offers and how you came to grow peonies at the farm.
Nicewicz Family Farm is an amazing under-the-radar farm, much-loved by those in the know! It’s owned and run by David Nicewicz and his three brothers Kenny, Tommy, and Alan, on land that was purchased by their grandparents in 1929.
It’s almost impossible to list everything they grow, but for fruit it includes apples, peaches, nectarines, blueberries, plums, pears, and even cherries and apricots. And for produce, in addition to corn for which they’re pretty famous, they grow everything from high summer items like tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers and basil, through fall items like squashes and gourds and pumpkins and even Indian corn. And they also grow some amazing flowers other than peonies like sunflowers and zinnias. They offer all of this at their farmstand in season, and also at various farmers’ markets closer in to Boston.
As far as how the peonies got started there, the Nicewiczs and I go way back, and when I ran out of space in my own yard for peonies, I leaned on them to let me try them at the farm. This was back in the fall of 2001, when I lived in Massachusetts. So David and I planted about 75 of them at the farm that year as an experiment. We started with 25 Festiva Maxima and 25 Sarah Bernhardt – which are classics that I had grown myself and knew would be successful – along with about 25 other varieties that I didn’t know much about.
Back then I was a full-time software engineer, working in Boston and Cambridge, and the peonies ended up being mostly neglected for about 10 years. But they prospered despite the neglect, and David and his brothers mostly just gave them to family and friends when they bloomed. In 2012/2013 we planted about 100 more, a combination of ones from the 2001 experiment that we really liked, as well as a lot of new varieties that we were unfamiliar with.
Then in 2015, which was after I had moved to Austin, my sister Adriane happened to visit the farm when they were blooming, and she sent me pictures, which kind of blew my mind because they were so stunning! I hopped on a plane to see for myself and became obsessed.
So that fall we planted about 400 more, and the next year about 800 more again. Which seemed crazy, but it actually made a certain amount of sense because we didn’t detect that there were any other serious peony growers in the Boston area at the time, so we were kind of filling a gap. We started selling them around 2019, at the farm and at farmer’s markets and to florists, and it’s just slowly grown since then.
When I came to visit in June, thank goodness for perfect timing to see the peonies in bloom, I noticed how you have quite a wide variety. How many varieties do you grow and how do you decide what you want to grow?
Loaded question! Well I think we grow about 150 varieties but not all of them are ones that we actually chose directly. It happens all the time that we order some variety X, and then receive something else altogether, either in whole or in part (i.e., we might order 10 of variety X, and we might actually receive 10 of some other variety altogether, or we might receive a mix of what we actually ordered and something else. In many cases we’ve grown to love the misfits, and in other cases we rue them. In all cases it’s really hard to keep track of them all because when this happens we don’t usually know what the misfits actually are! Right now we have 20 “mystery groups” formally assigned, which is a convention I started back in the early years but eventually gave up on because there are just too many. We should probably have 50 mystery groups. Now I just kind of call them “X NOT”. Sometimes you can find out from the seller what they mistakenly sent (and get replacements) but it’s challenging since you often may not see a bloom until the second year after you’ve planted it.
As far as how I decide what we’ll grow, it’s really a process of trial and error. First I look at ones we’ve already grown that we like and that have performed well, and then I consider award-winning peonies (as determined by the American Peony Society), and try to acquire those whenever I can. But we need to buy wholesale and it’s always a question of who’s offering what in any given year. And a lot of the ones we want are not offered wholesale at all, so sometimes we even buy retail for ones that seem like must-haves. And other times we just have to dig ones that we already grow and divide them – which we hate doing but we do it if we have to!
When I first became interested in peonies I only wanted big full fragrant doubles, but now I’m all over the map and see the allure in all the flower forms, and I’m not overly concerned about fragrance anymore. For me the delight is really in the visuals.
Stem strength is a factor that’s more important than I realized when I was first choosing what we’d grow. But for big full doubles you really need strong stems in order for them to stand up once they bloom, otherwise they tend to flop, and the stems may even break in some cases, which is not good.
I got the impression some of these varieties are quite unique and have a feeling you searched high & low for some — do you have any fun stories you can share with readers about finding some rare varieties?
Oh my gosh, there has been so much pain in tracking down and acquiring some of the varieties we have! Example: Doris Cooper. Doris Cooper is an exquisite pale pink double variety that we initially planted one of in 2001. Well by the time I had gotten on top of things and realized that we wanted more of them, our original supplier didn’t offer them anymore (and in fact that supplier no longer sells wholesale at all), so I engaged in endless searches for it, which yielded nothing and nothing and more nothing, until finally I found a tiny specialty grower in New Hampshire who was offering it in 2017. So David and I drove up there and paid more or less full retail for 4 roots, and we dug up and divided our single plant from 2001, which yielded 5 additional roots, so now we have 10 total, which we really suffered to produce! And there are so many more like that!
In other cases I’ve gotten peonies from other countries like Holland and even Lithuania. But we’re a very small grower and don’t get a lot of price breaks, so it’s mostly obsession rather than cost-effectiveness that drives many of these purchases.
How did peonies come to be your favorite flower? Do you grow any other plants or are peonies the only flowers for you?
Well there are lots of flowers I love, but I’m not a gardener and peonies are the only ones I grow myself. I’m obsessed with them because of all the various flower forms and colors mostly. My mother loved them too and had them at her wedding, but she could never grow them herself because she was in Houston, which doesn’t have the cold winters that peonies require. So it was thrilling for both of us when I bought my first house in Massachusetts and was able to grow them myself, she became a frequent June visitor!
In 2019 I did go off on a dahlia tangent and spent about $800 acquiring 2 each of about 75 differnt varieties to trial, but it was an experiment that pretty much totally failed. It seemed to be a tough year for dahlias that year, but dahlias also seem to require much more care and feeding than I’m willing to provide, so we pretty much just declared that experiment a failure. The Nicewiczs do still grow dahlias but I’ve had my fill of them now and prefer to just buy them as cut flowers from someone else!
What do you find to be the most challenging part of growing peonies?
For me it’s mostly just keeping track of them all! And keeping the weeds under control!
We have so many varieties, and so many of them are mysteries. It’s great that we have such a wide variety because it’s a differentiator for us, and it’s THRILLING to see each of them blooming, but I’m an engineer at heart so I do a lot of tracking and there are a lot of variables with peonies.
I used to make a big effort to make sure we had enough varieties to cover a range of bloom times, from very early to early to mid-season to late and very late, which is how they’re classified in the literature, but I finally realized that in a season that’s only about 3 weeks long – in a good year! – it’s kind of ridiculous to make such distinctions.
That said I still try to track things like bloom dates and productivity rates even though it tends to be a losing battle. At a certain point in the thick of the harvest all the record-keeping just falls apart. Especially in a really hot season when they all just bloom at once!
Anything else you’d like to share with Flirty Fleurs followers?
Well despite the challenges associated with growing 1700 of them, with so many different varieties (and still wanting to try more!), peonies are a joy, and not all that much trouble in the grand scheme of things. At least they’re perennials, and they’re a cake walk compared to dahlias!
How can people find you?
Eugenia Harris
nicewiczpeonies.com
instagram: @nicewiczpeonies
facebook: NicewiczFamilyFarm
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Photographs in this post are by Alicia Schwede.
This blog first appeared on Flirty Fleurs.