Petal Power: Peace, Love, & Peonies
As we get a handle on what we’re growing in 2024, amongst the new selections we’re offering, we also have some oldies-but-goodies in our midst. With Phlox paniculata ‘Jeana’ named the 2024 Perennial Plant of the Year, “peach-fuzz” (PANTONE 13-1023) dubbed Pantone’s 2024 Color of the Year, it almost seems fitting that 1-800-FLOWERS would follow up with the “P” theme and hail Philodendron and Peony as their 2024 Plant and Flower of the Year. Lucky for us, we’ve been on the peony train for a while. This week, ahead of the looming spring and the time-of-the-peony, we’re gonna do a deep dive into the history, cultural uses, and landscape needs of our petally pals.
For many of you, perhaps peonies hold a particularly soft space in your memory bank. Ironically, my many years as a commissioned artist prior to my life in horticulture also found me dabbling in peony imagery quite a bit, to the point that I’d developed a bit of a desensitization to them. I didn’t really start to notice the peonies that had happily cultivated a space in my nana’s garden until much later in her life, after a stroke that had left her wheelchair-bound. In her final years, I’d find myself tending to her perennials in the springtime, nestled amongst frilly, semi-rose type, light-and-hot pink herbaceous peonies that sat along her fence-line to greet visitors (think ‘Sarah Bernhardt’ meets ‘Raspberry Sundae’ meets ‘Double Pink’… to this day, I’ve not been able to figure out what they are). Now, my apathy-bordering-on-disdain for these timeless garden classics has not only evolved to a feeling of love and respect, but to the same feeling of nostalgia and whimsy that I’m sure many of you can relate to when admiring a peony patch.
It's difficult to try to cram anything but footnotes about peonies into a weekly newsletter without bordering on an entire dissertation or even novella-style territory. Their history reaches as far back as the Ancient Greeks, named for a physician-to-the-gods of the same name: Pæon. Greek naturalist, Pliny, as well as herbalist and medicine man, Dioscorides, would both claim the peony plant to have medical benefits, coinciding with similar ideas occurring in Ancient China around the same time. In fact, the Ancient Chinese were known to have utilized peonies in ways similar to how we consume modern breakfast cereal, and the flowers and roots are still utilized in herbal teas today. Herbaceous peonies are said to have made their debut in England around the Fourteenth Century as a hardy border perennial, reaching France much later in the 1800’s, where they became the topic of interest and hybridization by French horticulturists. While the English have a notably longer history cultivating the herbaceous peony flower for garden use, it is the French who truly took peony hybridization to the next level, giving us many of the variations that are on the market today. Somehow, the history of the peony of the United States has a bit of a murky record prior to 1800, due likely to just a lack of literature on the subject as opposed to an overall lack of the plant’s presence amongst horticultural company. John Bartram was said to have quite a collection of both herbaceous as well as tree peonies, while “peony expert” H.A. Terry of Iowa, who had a handle on the reproduction and selection of over one hundred new peony varieties at his inherited Linnaean Botanic Garden in Flushing, NY. The inception of the American Peony Society in 1902 coincided with the nomenclature-defining collection at Cornell University involving nearly every commercially available specimen, numbering in the thousands, by 1904. Through careful consideration and painstaking observation, those involved in the Peony Society managed to wrangle the thousands down to approximately five-hundred individual varieties of herbaceous peonies, primarily those of Paeonia albiflora. As of this year, the American Peony Society is boasting their 2024 Gold Medal Award-winning peony – ‘Dreamtime’. Click here to read more about this semi-double beauty.
But what makes an herbaceous peony, a “good” herbaceous peony? Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder (the pe-holder?), meaning luckily for even the pickiest flower connoisseur, there is basically a peony for everyone. Peonies are categorized by their petal-style and number, as well as whether or not they are considered to be an herbaceous peony, a tree peony, or a hybrid of both – the Itoh peony.
Do the same standards exist for tree and Itoh peonies? Well, the short answer is… kind of. While all peonies exist in single, semi-double, and double forms, Itoh and tree peonies are overall heartier plants, not requiring cut-back at the end of their season and known ultimately for producing larger blooms. Cultivated as a medicinal herb in China prior to 600 A.D., it wasn’t until the Tang Dynasty in the three years following that the tree peony truly took off as an ornamental and culture-worthy plant, finding its way into art, poetry, fashion, architecture, and other facets of Ancient Chinese imperial society. In Japan, the tree peony is revered as a symbol of prosperity, with summertime festivals, events, and shows held throughout the country for onlookers to revel in their beauty and spiritual or religious significance. The history and modern use of tree peonies in both England and the United States is rather minimal, but that’s not to say they don’t have a place in our gardens. On the contrary, tree peonies have created a place for themselves amongst the botanical gardens of America – the New York Botanical Garden is home to the Dolores DeFina Hope Tree Peony Collection, featuring over one hundred mature tree peony specimens that create a dazzling mid-spring display, rivaled only by later emergence of thousands of roses in the Rose Garden located below. Make sure to visit in early May for the full spectacle of tree peonies at NYBG. If you’ll be passing through New Jersey on your way to NYBG in May, it would be worth your while to stop at Peony’s Envy in Bernardsville, NJ, to visit their display garden, open from April 26th to June 9th this year.
Itoh peonies, as previously mentioned, are the best of both worlds. Crossed between some type of Paeonia lactiflora and a co-parenting tree peony, Itoh peonies display tough winter hardiness and reliability paired with the longest bloom time of all. ‘Bartzella’, ‘Cora Louise’, and ‘Old Rose Dandy’ are some of the better-known Itoh peony examples, although you can find a handful of others growing amongst their herbaceous brethren during spring in our peony production house. Below is a complete list of our currently available, or soon-to-be-available, herbaceous and Itoh peonies here at Pleasant Run.
Persuaded by peonies? Come this spring, we’ll have 15+ varieties to choose from – check back early and often to claim yours when we start putting them into inventory!
Itoh Peonies | American Peony Society
Tree Peonies » New York Botanical Garden (nybg.org)
How to Grow and Care for Tree Peony (thespruce.com)
How to grow tree peonies / RHS Gardening
Itoh-and-Intersectional-Peony-Groups.pdf (americanpeonysociety.org)
See all our Perennials