Ithink first of my grandmother’s front lawn, nice but never exceptionally tidy beneath the shadow of her great, brick Italianate house.

The plants were its border, and they’d enliven every spring with those big, pink blossoms, layered and bold.

Backdrop to a million Ann Arbor photographs announcing graduations, engagements or weddings, peonies this week were the news.

Vandals, calling for more support of Palestine amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, hacked off hundreds of blossoms at The Arb, and all the town gasped in sorrow for, as reporter/editor Sam Dodge writes , they are a “source of pride for a city of flower lovers.”

“It’s really sad that political group felt they had to do that,” a painter told photographer and videographer Jake Hamilton .

Plant lives don’t matte

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