The irresistible peony

There has been a long tradition of growing tree peonies in Victoria. Several famous collections were built up over the years, often by doctors many years ago, who imported them from overseas. They grew them in one or two unlikely spots, like a sandy slope above the beach at Olivers Hill within spray-reach of Victoria’s Port Phillip Bay, for instance. Another was at Apollo Bay, exposed to ocean winds.  

Judy Roberts of Emerald in the Dandenongs took over several of these and when she sadly died in the late 1990s, Ronnie Boekel took them all on, moving them yet again to his nursery in Monbulk.  

Why all this fuss and bother over plants that only flower in spring, you may ask. Well, you only have to see a peony blooming to know why. Peony aficionados never take holidays in spring.  

The tree peony has been legendary in China for a good 2,000 years, and in Australia since the 1850s gold rush, when a Chinese miner arrived bringing a few of his favourites with him. Consequently, if you want to see Australia’s biggest peonies, you must go to Ballarat and Bendigo; there you find enormous specimens of the ancient (so-called) P. Etienne de France. One or two of these approach three metres high and display hundreds of their fully double, flesh-tinted opalescent-silver blooms every spring. Of course the name is wrong. It should have a Chinese name; however, some nursery person years ago decided a name evocative of Paris during the Belle Époque and the delights of the Moulin Rouge might help to sell their plants. 

In more recent years, peonies have undergone a revolution. Prof. Saunders of Hamilton College in New York crossed the old Chinese and (later) Japanese varieties with the vigorous yellow species P. lutea to produce the much easier-to-grow lutea hybrids – things like ‘Boreas’ and ‘Golden Vanity,’ ‘Black Panther’ and ‘Hephestos’, ‘Tiger Tiger’ and ‘Heart of Darkness’. As you see, Prof. Saunders took the naming of his plants very seriously. 

More recently, Mr Itoh in Japan achieved the even more difficult cross of a tree peony with a herbaceous peony (the herbaceous are irritating – easy to propagate but difficult to flower) to give the world of gardening the ultimate peonies, the Itoh hybrids.  

Following their tree peony parent, Itoh hybrids do not need winter chilling and happily flower in beachside suburbs. Like their herbaceous parent, they are compact and free-flowering. All the Itohs need is at least half-sun, good drainage and slightly limey soils. In clay soils, probably they’re best in raised beds, which traditionally is how the Chinese connoisseurs grew their peonies – retained, ideally, by very fancy carved stone lattice work.