What I Know About Peony 
Lady Alexandra Duff. 
I N tlie year 190 r I sent to Kelway & Son for five plants. Tliey flowered 
* only imperfectly the following year, hut 1 was afraid on account of 
these imperfect flowers that they were wrong. 1 immediately wrote them 
to .send me five more plants in my shipment of that year. The next year, 
when the fir.st five were two years old, they produced flowers of Fe.stiva 
maxima. The .second lot flowered well in 1904, and 1 showed them at 
the exhibition of the Massaduusetts Horticultural Society in June, and they 
awarded me a first-ckuss certificate for them. 
At the ro.se show of this same .society, which followed the peony show 
in one week, Messrs. T. C. Thurlow & Son showed a peony under that 
name which they had imported from Kelway & Son, which 1 had on my 
grounds under two names — one imported from Kelway & Son in the year 
1901 as Prince.ss of Wales, and another one as James Kelway, later. 1 also 
have had the same peony from another grower in America as the James 
Kelway. At the last peony show William Whitman’s gardener of Brook- 
line, Mass., showed a Duchesse de Nemours (Calot) under the name of 
Lady Alexandra Duff, imported direct from Kelway & Son. 
To sum it up, we have fir.st Fe.stiva maxima ; second, Granditlora nivea, 
an old variety of 1825 — for this is the second variety which I received and 
which was awarded the first-class certificate by the Massachusetts Horti- 
cultural Society in 1904 ; third, we have the one sent Thurlow & Son, 
which 1 already had as Princess of Wales and James Kelway ; fourth, we 
have the old variety of Duchesse de Nemours (Calot) which was sent 
to Mr. Whitman. 
Here are three old varieties renamed and sent out as Lady A. Duff — 
and two varieties of his own growing — Princess of Wales and James 
Kelway, also as Lady A. Duff. All this time Kelway & Son are saying 
the stock is nearly exhausted, but for our money they are shipping this stuff. 
I am led to the conclusion that there is no such peony as Lady 
Alexandra Duff, or Lady A. McDuff, as it was first called. It has been, 
probably, a renaming of an old French variety from the very beginning, 
and when one variety runs short select another and so continue the fraud. 
E. J. SHAYLOR, 
Welle.sley Hills, Mass. 
