062 
POLYANDRIA. DIGYNIA. P^onia. 
DIGYNIA. 
(PiEO'NIA. # Cal. five-leaves : Petals five: Styles none: 
Follicles with many seeds. E.) 
(P. corai/lina. Leaves twice temate: leafits egg-shaped, undivided, 
smooth: seed-vessels downy, recurved. 
E. Bot. 1513 —-Mill III t. 47. 
Stems about two feet high, annual, simple, leafy, cylindrical, smooth, more 
or less red. Leaves smooth ; the uppermost often ternate at the extre¬ 
mity only, with a pair of simple leafits below. Leafits sharp-pointed, 
entire, sometimes veined with red. Flower terminal, solitary. Calyx of 
five concave irregular leaves. Petals five, crimson, regular, roundish. 
Stamens red, with yellow anthers. Germens mostly three or four, egg- 
shaped, white, downy, with recurved, crimson stigmas. Seeds black, 
shining, intermixed with crimson, abortive ones. 
Entire-leaved or Coral Peony. P. corallina. Retz. P. cfificinalis fl. 
Linn. P. mas. Matth. Less frequent in gardens than P. ojficinalis or fee- 
mina. This very showy addition to the British Flora was first introduced 
to the notice of Botanists by Mr. F. Bowcher Wright, in 1803, as grow¬ 
ing undoubtedly wild, and in great profusion, in the rocky clefts of the 
island called Steep Holmes in the broad part of the river Severn. It is 
conjectured to have grown there for ages. Two fishermen testify having 
gathered its flowers sixty or seventy years ago. According to Gerard, 
once found on a rabbit warren near Gravesend, but no traces of it 
remain. P. May—June. E.)t 
by the tedious uncertain process of the crgastiri. The foreign kinds are, it must be 
admitted, more showy than our own, but some of the latter are worthy of garden culture, 
and thrive in a dry soil. Though the flowers are extremely fugacious, by intermixing the 
several species, a succession may be obtained for two or three months. E.) 
* (After the physician P^eon, immortalized for having cured the wounds received by the 
gods during the Trojan war, as some ingeniously infer, with the aid of this plant. E.) 
f (Peeonies, double or single, white or crimson, are splendid acquisitions to the garden 
and shrubbery. Few aquatic excursions of a day can prove more interesting to the 
naturalist, especially the geologist, ornithologist, and botanist, than a sail from Bristol, 
through the romantic pass of St. Vincent’s rocks, to the Holmes Islands. The Steep 
Holmes represents the rugged truncated apex of a submarine mountain, whose abruptly 
precipitous sides are only accessible at one proper landing-place. Amidst the shelving 
rocks and loose shingly stones, a few hundred yards from, and at an elevation of nearly 
one hundred feet above, this spot, at the eastern end of the island, 
et There may ye see the Peony spread wide,”— 
together with the scarcely less rare Allium ampeloprasum , as the Editor had the gratifi¬ 
cation to behold in June, 1826’. The latter plant has effected a lodgment below the light 
house on the Flat Holmes, but the Peony is altogether peculiar to the sister island, and 
how far it may be deemed an aboriginal, strictly indigenous, or derived fortuitously from 
some wrecked Levanter, or possibly, though not probably, escaped from the little en¬ 
closure, whose ruinous walls and few remaining vestiges seem 
“ To mark where a garden had been,” 
must remain problematical, so far as our investigations are concerned; no vessel having 
been stranded within the memory of man, nor any inhabitant dwelt thereon, save the 
solitary fisherman who makes the crazy hut his cheerless abode, and that only through the 
dreary season of winter. The Peony also extends over the crests of the northern preci- 
