Notebook continued
‘Festivus maxima’. one of the loveliest whites, also needs staking.
A seed head from a tree peony.
arranged in one or two rows around a centre of golden stamens, which bear pollen. ‘Scarlet O’Hara and ‘Krinkled White’ are two examples. •
Japanese forms are similar to singles, but the stamens,
although yellow, have no free pollen. ‘Kukene Jishi’ and ‘Garden Lace’ are lovely examples of the Japanese form. •
Anenomes have one row of wide flat petals that hold a
bowl of upright stamens that have morphed into feathery petals. The popular ‘Bowl of Beauty’ would fall into this class. •
Finally, there are the familiar doubles or bomb peonies. Semi-Double forms have multiple petals surrounding a
centre of true, pollen-bearing stamens. Look for the coral coloured ‘Cytherea’ and white ‘Rare China’. •
When they arrived on the scene, people were so thrilled that they simply extinguished attention from all other forms. These peonies show no evidence of stamens. You will recognize ‘Sarah Bernhardt’, the familiar pink peony, and ‘Festiva Maxima‘, with its few flecks of red hidden amongst the snowy white petals. We tend to fixate on the beauty of the flowers, but peonies were
grown primarily for their medicinal properties for thousands of years. Their dried roots are known in Mandarin as shao yao, peony medicine. Peony medicine was used as anti-spasmodic, an anti in- flammatory, as a blood thinner and to combat dementia. Among their many virtues, peonies are deer and rabbit resistant,
drought tolerant, subject to few diseases or pests and, best of all, they can live 80 to 100 years, and even longer if the roots are di- vided from time to time. `
www.localgardener.net Summer 2012 • 7
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