I found this quote from Bill, when included as part of this particular conversation, to be quite interesting :

“Wouldn’t ruffling… be great when added into some peony flowers.”

I believe the seeds Bill mentions were some of the seeds I purchased from him, i.e. ‘Old Soldier x Valkyre’ of which a fair percentage  grew out into red doubles.  I selected the pollen from one of them ( field name “Asterisk”, because of it’s “spikey” flowers) to use in a big hybridizing push that I made at the time of it’s first flowering.   Because it was something totally new to me, I crossed it hard with Salmon Dream, Lemon Chiffon, and Blushing Princess.  I grew out perhaps 200+ seedlings, which all bloomed this year, with even more on the way for this coming spring.  Granted that’s a lot of seedlings to select from, but even so, among each of those crosses, a few seedlings from each were notably ruffled, in a particularly noteworthy manner that I’ve not seen in any other peonies that I know of.  Although only the tiniest percentage were red (which seems recessive when used on the pod parents I chose) the determining factor in each seems to be their OS X Val parentage.

I’m not sure how Bill came to include his comments about ruffling in his post above, but given my results, I found it interesting that somehow he included it in a conversation regarding these varieties.

Bob Johnson