422 



JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



HERBACEOUS P/EONIES. 



By Mr. Geokge Paul, F.R.H.S. 



[Read June 10, 1890.] 



The Paeony, cultivated as a double flower in many varieties, 

 is a modern introduction — so modern that we are in time, by 

 taxing the memory of men living who have seen the rise of the 

 plant as a florist's flower, to secure its correct history. I appre- 

 hend the Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society cannot be 

 better employed than in registering the horticultural progress of 

 any gardening flower, and so I have endeavoured, in the short 

 paper I am about to read, to obtain this record. Mr. Lynch will 

 treat of the various species of Pseonies, and you will learn that, 

 in his opinion as a practised botanist, the garden varieties spring 

 from a few species only. From careful observation of varieties, 

 he appears to me to be quite correct in assuming them mostly to 

 be sprung from P. alb i flora and P. officinalis ; some few from 

 P. peregrina ; and two or three from P. tenuifolia ; but we have 

 to add to these, as the originals of our garden varieties, the two 

 double forms imported from China as P. Beevesi and P. Pottsi, 

 which probably gave rise to their name of Chinese Pseonies, 

 " hybrids of sinensis " as they are called in Verdier's list — the 

 Anemone-flowered varieties seeming to appear in both the offici- 

 nalis and paradoxa offspring. 



The double forms therefore existing when the florists took 

 them in hand were the three forms of officinalis, rubra, rosea, 

 and carnescens plena ; ancmonceflora plena, Beevesi, Pottsi, and 

 tenuifolia plena. The older writers mention few : Gerard in 1598, 

 the double white and double red, and a single red and white 

 variety, and he adds "all sorts of Paaonies do grow in our London 

 gardens*" Parkinson mentions two double forms in the " Para- 

 disus " in 1G5G— the double red as very common and the double 

 blush. Miller's dictionary gives tw T o double red and " the greater 

 Paaony with a double whitish flower," probably our carnescens. 

 In Hales' " Eden," 1773, one, the great double red Paeony, is 

 described. Kew, from the " Hortus Kewensis " of 1789, possessed 

 only two kinds, officinalis and tenuifolia ; whilst Abercromby in 

 1780, and Mackintosh in 1823, neither of them mentions Preonies 

 as garden flowers. My own firm's number book of about 1850 



