More on peonies

Title: More on peonies

Diane, thanks for mentioning P. mlokosewitschii. It is indeed a really wonderful peony. I planted a seedling of one of those in my parents' garden in England sometime around 1987 and it's still there, now a large clump with superb pale yellow flowers each spring. It's next to one of the Chinese (or Tibetan in this case) tree peonies, P. ludlowii, which has smaller, deep lemon yellow flowers.

Re habitats, Trevor, you're right that woodland is not the main habitat. In the wild, I've seen P. broteroi in the Sierra Nevada of southern Spain, on the main road up into the mountains from Granada. They were growing in open limestone rocky shrubland. I saw P. mascula in southwestern Turkey, trying to grow in dense, old-growth cedar of Lebanon forest (wondrous place), but the most vigorous plants were in more open forest where the cedars were mixed with the evergreen kermes oak (Quercus coccifera). I've seen P. clusii in numerous places in Crete and Karpathos, in a wide variety of habitats, including open "garigue"-covered hillsides, margins of cultivated terraces, quite dense evergreen mediterranean woodland, open montane woodland with scattered trees of kermes oak, cypress (Cupressus sempervirens), and Cretan maple (Acer sempervirens), and also olive groves. The olive grove plants had pinkish flowers, like blackberry juice mixing into cream, and were surrounded by a glaring yellow carpet of Bermuda buttercups (Oxalis pes-caprae) -- actually quite an attractive scene, though the purist in me cringes at the mere thought of it...

Nick


Nick Turland
Flora of China Project, Missouri Botanical Garden,
P.O. Box 299, St. Louis, MO 63166-0299, U.S.A.
E-mail: Nicholas.Turland@mobot.org
Phone: +1 314 577 0269 Fax: +1 314 577 9438
MBG web: http://www.mobot.org
FOC web: http://flora.huh.harvard.edu/china/
Flora of Crete Supplement:
http://www.marengo.supanet.com/text/fcs.htm


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