July, 1919 
U 
Simplest of all is 
the single, closely 
resembling the type 
flower before horti¬ 
culturists altered it 
ent mortal has suggested that the odor 
of the common red peony, Pceonia of¬ 
ficinalis, is in itself enough to have 
given rise to the story of the physic¬ 
ian. Be that as it may, time was when 
one swallowed the great black seeds at 
bed time to keep the nightmare away. 
An infusion of peony and sack drunk 
before and after the new moon was a 
sure preventive of all sorts of ills, 
while in the case of children, much 
the same ends were attained without 
the really needless expenditure of 
sack, -by the simple treatment of ty¬ 
ing a bit of dried peony root about 
the youngster’s neck on a string. 
An All-around Variety 
In time the plant came to have 
attributed to it other more occult 
powers than the scientific properties 
mentioned above. Our great-grand¬ 
parents did wisely on more counts 
than one in seeing to it that a thrifty 
‘‘piney” plant flourished in the door- 
yard, for aside from the hardiness, 
beauty and modest cultural demands 
of the plant, its very presence was 
sovereign against all enchantments. 
Let Pceonia officinalis, then, in all 
the varieties you can muster be in¬ 
cluded in your planting, not only for 
the sake of these old fables and be¬ 
liefs that clustered around it, but be¬ 
cause, coming as it does in red, white, 
and pink, in both double and single forms, 
flowering in May, several weeks before 
great class of Chinese peonies, it lengthens 
the season by that much. 
Officinalis is a native of southern Europe. 
In English and other European languages it 
has furnished the name for the whole family. 
It is, however, not to Leto but to the gods 
of the frozen north that our thanks are due for 
the fragrant June peonies of our modem gar¬ 
dens. For they are all direct lineal descend- 
ents of a wild Siberian plant known as Pceonia 
albifiora. According to travelers returning from 
that country, albifiora is to be found growing 
on bleak hillsides, where in winter the mercury 
would register sixty degrees below zero. Al¬ 
though its name would indicate a white flower, 
it really has, we are told, a much wider range 
of color in the wild state, for not only white 
but pink, crimson, and deep red flowered sorts 
are said to be found there. These flowers are 
single and fragrant. 
Peonies in the Far East 
In Siberia the Tartars used the roots as food, 
and this seems to have been the original source 
of its appeal to the Chinese, who have culti¬ 
vated this peony from very early times. With 
the latter people, however, the decorative pos¬ 
sibilities of the plant and the natural beauty 
and charm of the flowers brought it out of the 
kitchen garden centuries ago, when a definite 
attempt was made to increase the size and im¬ 
prove the quality of its blooms. Although con¬ 
siderable progress seems to have been made 
along these lines by the Chinese, these Siberian 
peonies apparently never came to be considered 
anything but second class with them, for they 
called these the "King's Ministers,” while the 
title “King of Flowers” they reserved for their 
own native peony, Pceonia Mont an. 
This is the great tree peony of the East, 
which grows into a shrubbery plant with woody 
stalks and attains a height of 5' or 6'. The 
The bomb form of 
peony shows an ex¬ 
treme development 
of central petals re¬ 
placing the stamens 
At the left (below) 
is Festiva maxima 
and at the right M. 
Jides Elie. Both are 
desirable varieties 
Crown is a well 
chosen name for this 
odd type with its 
encircling band di¬ 
viding the petals 
One 4-year-old plant of Agnes 
Mary Kelway has borne as many 
as 150 blooms in a single season 
From such simple beginnings as the type 
shown in the upper left corner of this 
page has been developed the complex 
rose form 
flowers are very large and are said 
to show colors lacking in the herba- 
cious section of the family, particu¬ 
larly scarlets and pure reds. There 
are, also, white, blush, pink, maroon 
and purplish flowered sorts. At last 
a double yellow tree peony, so long 
the dream of the Chinese enthusiasts, 
has been attained, but in France, 
kids, however, is a hybrid developed, 
I understand, from Pceonia lutea, a 
small single yellow tree peony found 
growing in China. 
The tree peony is only occasionally 
seen in American gardens owing 
mainly to rather unsatisfactory meth¬ 
ods of propagating it. Experiments 
are being made, however, which all 
peony enthusiasts are watching with 
much interest, hoping the time is soon 
coming when it will be possible and 
practicable to include tree peonies in 
our gardens generally. 
Other Eastern Sorts 
Although the Siberian peony has 
been grown in China for hundreds of 
years, it was not introduced into Eu¬ 
rope until the early part of the 19th 
Century, when, of course, coming 
from China, it was called the Chinese 
peony to distinguish it from officin¬ 
alis. Considerable interest seems to 
have been aroused, and various at¬ 
tempts, some successful, were made to 
import roots from the Orient. Fragrans, some¬ 
times said to be the most fragrant peony culti¬ 
vated in Europe, was imported about 1805 by 
Sir Joseph Banks, head of the Royal Botanical 
Gardens at Kew. I have never read whether 
Sir Joseph made any attempts to originate new 
forms or not. But between his time and this 
many wonderful new forms and color schemes 
have been produced by selecting and crossing 
the limited number of sorts originally imported 
from the East. 
As one looks at the beautiful flowers and 
realizes that five or six years must elapse be¬ 
tween seed sowing and first blooming time, 
and that, when blooming time does come, only 
one seedling out of a hundred, perhaps, will 
prove worthy of records and heralds, and when 
one makes a mental calculation of how long 
it will take biannual divisions to obtain a 
stock sufficient to be of any account, one is 
not likely to rush into growing peony seedlings 
unless—well, it is distinctly a labor of love. 
I o have gone out some fine morning and have 
a Festiva maxima just springing into being in 
one’s own garden must have made the watch¬ 
ing and the waiting well worth while indeed. 
Glory to whom glory is due, praise to whom 
praise. Both glory and praise are due in my 
estimation to those patient men who have done 
the waiting and watching. I cannot go into 
detail here and tell how Monsieur Jacques, 
the King’s gardener, set about forming that 
pioneer collection. Nor can I even outline the 
work of those other illustrious Frenchmen who 
(Continued on page 60) 
