How much do we love peonies? We have North America's largest collection of peonies at Whistling Gardens, and another large one at the Oshawa Peony Garden. We seem to love them a lot. There are 1,300 varieties of herbaceous, intersectional, tree and species peonies at Whistling Gardens.
The peony that we are most excited about is the Itoh peony. Dr. Toichi Itoh, a Japanese botanist crossed tree peonies with herbaceous peonies. The resulting plants have the best traits of the parents, hardiness and herbaceous growth along with gorgeous flower colours and forms of the tree peony AND they don't fall over - they have the tree peony strength of stem. Itoh's hybridization took place in 1948, with seeds germinating, and then there was a decade of seedling oversight before the hybrids bloomed. Dr. Itoh died in 1956, so it was his family who oversaw the process. American Botanist Louis Smirnow, brought them to the USA where the Itoh name came about and hybrids first patented.
i don't know what makes them so expensive - at least $50.00 a plant. So let's find out. That amount is now inexpensive compared to the days prior to tissue culture. Prior to that they were only available by division and a small root could sell for $300. It took many attempts at tissue culture for a breakthrough, and today tissue culture is used for mass production. Peonies grow at a slow pace, so the costs are significantly reduced, but won't likely get 'cheap'.
A mature plant can produce 30 or more blooms each season. And they are big flowers, very showy in the garden. While there are no blue peonies, they come in white, yellow, orange, pink and red with variations.
Our world of plants and flowers has grown and changed significantly in the last twenty-five years with tissue culture. I've wondered what will happen when it becomes easy to produce humans via tissue culture. There are applications of human cell culture now. Can you imagine replications existing? It is curious at best and a horror tale at worst.
Leet's stick with plants and peonies: it is a wonderful story of abundance and beauty.
Here's the small peony collection at Winterthur with the bee hive gazebo as a focal point.
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