Peony

Paeonia sp. · Garden flowers

More at iNaturalist

Peony, fully open

New York Botanical Garden, 26 May 2025

A full, ruffled white peony with a few carmine-tipped staminodes breaking up the gold at the centre, and a pink bud waiting behind it. Peonies are named for Paeon, physician to the Greek gods, and the roots were medicine long before the flowers were ornament; the Chinese were breeding them for the garden by the seventh century, when they were the imperial flower and a good plant changed hands for gold.

Peony and bud

Goodnestone, 1 June 2024

A fully double peony open, and a tight round bud beside it still pale rather than pink - peony buds show little colour until close to opening. The buds are often sticky with a sweet secretion, and ants farm it, which is where the old gardener's tale comes from that peonies need ants to open; they don't, but the ants do no harm and probably keep other insects off.

Peonies below the church tower

Goodnestone, 1 June 2024

Fully double peonies, the flower form bred so hard toward petals that almost nothing of the stamens survives, with the flint tower of the parish church standing behind them beyond the garden wall. Peonies are absurdly long-lived for a border plant - a clump can flower for a century in the same spot and resents being moved - so a planting like this may well be older than anyone tending it.

Peony

Goodnestone, 1 June 2024

An anemone-form peony: broad outer guard petals doing the usual peony display, but the centre replaced with a dense ruff of narrow cream petaloids instead of the mass of gold stamens a single-flowered variety would show.

Bred for exactly this effect, and a good way to tell the anemone and Japanese forms from the plain single at a glance. The petaloids are stamens that have half-turned into petals, which is how every double flower in cultivation began.