This has been a fantastic year for peonies — a flower as fantastic as the stories of its origin. The flower is named for Paeon, the physician to the gods in Greek mythology, who angered his teacher Asclepius when he used an extract from the root of the peony to cure Pluto. When a jealous Asclepius threatened to kill Paeon, Zeus saved him by turning him into a beautiful flower. Peonies are still valued in traditional Eastern medicine: their root and seeds are used to treat headache, asthma, and the pains associated with childbirth.
The Itoh peony is a hybrid between a herbaceous peony and a tree peony, first cultivated in 1948 by Toichi Itoh, a Japanese peony grower and breeder, as the result of some 20,000 crosses he attempted in his lifetime.Sadly, Itoh passed away in 1956 before his plant flowered. In 1966 Louis Smirnow, a New York accountant and peony enthusiast, secured the plants from Itoh’s widow and brought them to the United States, registering the plants as Itoh Smirnow hybrids. For years, these hybrids were as horrifically expensive as lady slipper orchids, although far less finicky to grow. But now they can be found at affordable prices in many local nurseries, and well worth the price.
I love traditional herbaceous peonies, too, and they have been wonderful this year as well. A broken stem on one taught me the truth of Mrs. Francis King’s pronouncement “Long ago I learned that really to see peonies they should be so grown that one could sit near or actually beside them. The Beginner’s Garden, 1927. We do not bring a lot of cut flowers indoors, primarily because of four cats who like to nibble on them or spill them. But there was no choice but to cut that bloom and bring it inside, where it filled our kitchen with a heavenly scent for over a week. I always think of roses and lilacs as the scent plants par excellence, but the peony is their equal.
After her first book, The Well-Considered Garden, appeared in 1915, Louisa Boyd Yeomans King rapidly rose to prominence as a lecturer and author. She turned to gardening as a profession rather than a hobby, after she and her invalid husband, Francis King, moved to a sanitarium in Alma, Michigan, where the couple built a home called Orchard House. In a neat Byrdcliffe connection, one of Louisa King’s inspriations in the planning of her garden, was Elizabeth and Her German Garden, a novel by Elizabeth von Arnim, a frequent Byrdcliffe visitor. (Whose volumes can be found in the Byrdcliffe Library. More on that next week.)
King was also an inveterate organizer of garden clubs, for she believed that gardening could be a force for promoting democracy and peace. From 1914 to 1921, she served as the first president of the Woman’s National Farm & Garden Association, which she helped found. During World War I, the WNF&GA helped organize the Woman’s Land Army of America in which 15,000 “farmerettes” worked in agriculture, replacing men called into military service. For her role in these efforts, King was awarded the National War Garden Commission’s bronze medal.
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