Bustling crowds and bus rides are part of the annual peony pilgrimage to Michigan

ANN ARBOR, Mich. (AP) — It’s time to peek at the peak peonies.

Visitors are making the annual pilgrimage to the University of Michigan this week to see -- and smell -- one of the world’s premier collections of the garden plant, featuring showy red, white and pink blooms of countless shades and varieties.

Melanie Millar and her friends visited the Ann Arbor school’s Nichols Arboretum on Monday to take some graduation photos.

The 18-year-old Millar is set to graduate from a Detroit-area high school in a matter of days.

“I’m here with my best friends — a bunch of girls. … We just came here to get pictures since it’s going to be a nice day, and the Peony Garden seemed like a nice place to go to,” Millar said.

The W.E. Upjohn Peony Garden features the largest collection of historic — pre-1950 — herbaceous peonies in North America, “and likely the world,” curator David Michener said.

“Once you come here to the Peony Garden, you’ll be mesmerized, and you’ll understand why people love peonies,” he said. “The fragrances, the colors, the forms, it’s just intoxicating.”

The peony watch is a spectator sport with tens of thousands of visitors arriving at The Arb each spring to behold the unique perennials -- so many that visitors have to be bused in.

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But there was a somber mood among some Monday. Vandals cut off the blooms of roughly 250 peonies a day earlier, the University of Michigan Division of Public Safety and Security said in a statement.

Although no group or organization has taken credit for vandalizing the garden, some papers were left behind, DPSS said. One referenced the war in Gaza, saying: “Palestinian lives deserve to be cared for. More than these flowers.”

“What would possess someone just to destroy nature and the beauty of it? It’s just unfathomable,” visitor Linda J.K. Klenczar said Monday. “There’s no explanation. I don’t know if they’re going to catch someone who did this. They need to explain themselves.”

It’s a moving target each year as to when the peonies will reach peak bloom. And one of great interest – with scores of peony-watchers glued to the Arb’s Instagram page for updates.

“What makes it so challenging to predict is they pay no attention to the calendar,” Michener said. “They’re driven totally by day and night temperatures.”

The campus Peony Garden contains more than 300 historic cultivated varieties from the 19th and early 20th centuries, representing American, Canadian and European peonies of the era. The garden typically features up to 10,000 flowers at peak bloom.

Their colorful blossoms draw admirers from Michigan and beyond, but the peonies’ beauty is not their primary function. The garden is designed as a support mechanism for academia -- to be a research collection for students and faculty to explore genomics and social issues.

Michener and his colleagues at Matthaei Botanical Gardens and Nichols Arboretum work closely with their sister garden in Minsk, the Central Botanical Garden of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, trying to understand how ornamental peonies are related to each other and the wild, ancestral species.

Michigan’s Peony Garden is free to visit and open from sunrise to sunset. For those drawn to the ancient plant’s scent, Michener said it’s best to show up earlier in the day or later in the evening, when the fragrances are the best.

“It’s very colorful. I have a lot of peonies in my backyard, so I have a spot for them. But they’re a beautiful flower,” Millar said.