botanical enthusiasm of Sir Joseph Banks ; who 
having heard of their beauty, employed a gentle- 
man attached to the East India Company’s service, 
at Canton, to obtain and send roots of them to 
England; and the first of these treasures arrived in 
1789. Others were subsequently obtained through 
the same channel, and the few individuals of that 
day, who were imbued with floricultural zeal, looked 
on their flowers with admiration; and with expec- 
tations further stimulated by the accounts received 
from the missionaries, and traders to China, who 
told of rare varieties, with blue flowers and with 
yellow ones, of corresponding size and splen- 
dour. These expectations have never yet been 
realized ; a yellow Paeony, however, has been sent 
from the Crimea, to the Horticultural Society, but 
it is an herbaceous species, and now valued, on 
the continent, at twenty-five guineas the plant. 
The most marked distinction between the Mou- 
tan and all other Paeonies is, that its stems are 
shrubby ; they endure our winters, gradually en- 
larging from year to year, till they become, when 
in flower, as individual lawn plants, truly magni- 
ficent. Mention is made in Loudon's Arboretum, 
(1838) of a plant at Sir Abraham Hume’s, atWorm- 
leybury, that having been planted thirty years, was 
seven feet high, forming a bush of fourteen feet in 
diameter. “It stands the winter, in general, very 
well, but if the flower buds swell too early in Feb- 
ruary, it becomes advisable to cover the plant slight- 
ly with a mat. In the year 1835, this plant per- 
fected 3-20 flowers, and has been known to bear 
three times that number.” 
