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Home > Flower and garden articles > Entrancing Tree Peonies
Entrancing Tree Peonies
 Nowhere has their popularity been so intense as in China, where the peonies invoke mass hysteria. It is impossible to compare the frenzied adoration for these flowers. It is as if a whole nation is besotted with tree peonies, which have been enshrined as China’s national flower. The herbaceous peony rose is also popular, but it does not enjoy the same prestige as the tree form.
The Chinese have had many names for tree peonies including Hua Wang - the king of flowers, and Fu Gui – wealthy and honourable. Both names are aptly suited to these magnificent plants.
Historical evidence suggests that the peony was first valued for its medicinal and magical properties. Peony roots were one of the ingredients used in alternative medicine to increase sexual drive and resolve male sexual problems. The benefits of these remedies remain a mystery in themselves.
The supremacy of the peony has been considerable. Chinese cities would become places of frenzied excitement whilst the flowers were in full bloom. Competition was excessive amongst courtiers trying to produce the most exotic and intoxicating blooms. This could only be compared to ‘tulipomania’ which preoccupied Holland in the seventeenth century.
It is difficult to establish the origins of peonies with any accuracy. They were grown and highly prized as early as 581 AD in the Sui Dynasty. Literature and art reflect the existence and importance of the plant even earlier than this. A painting by Gu Kaizhi (346-406 AD) depicts a garden scene featuring scarlet and pink tree peonies. A poem
written in 600 BC by an anonymous author goes like this:
Beyond the River Wei
The land is open and pleasant.
A knight and a lady
Sport and play
Then she gives him a peony.
The poetry celebrates the peony for its potent sexual possibilities.
In 1933 the tree peony was threatened with extinction when the Yellow River flooded and washed away more than half of the peony crops. Many of the remaining peony farms were sacrificed to cope with food shortages. By 1949 there were fewer than one hundred varieties. From the 1980s national and local governments in China provided funding which has re-established and revitalised the peony industry.
Some species in China are thought to be over three hundred years old. Few exist in the wild today, but with the focus on maintaining the national plant of China, their future is positive.
Cultivation and breeding of new forms of peonies has been extensive. Today six hundred varieties are produced in the nurseries of Heze and Luoyang. Luoyang is still China’s central producer of tree peonies. They are supplied for the Chinese market as well as for their growing popularity throughout the world.
The simplistic beauty of the peony tree has been celebrated in art and literature, for its medicinal and magical possibilities. But nowhere is it more celebrated than in a garden in sfull blooms surrounded by its rich green foliage.
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