TWO NEW RACES OF PEONIES

By A. P. Saunders, Clinton, N. Y.

American Peony Society Bulletin No. 100, Dec. 1945

I want to report first on a race of peonies that is still too recent to make any very definite decision on; but the plants so far obtained are sufficiently new in their characters and sufficiently beautiful in their bloom so that I want to get the race recorded without further delay.

The parentage of these plants is more complicated than any strains that have yet been reported, and one of the interesting aspects of the crosses is that they offer thus an incentive to more complicated breeding plans.

Here is the situation: One of the four parents of these plants is a pink Chinese peony of the Japanese type. There is nothing remarkable about it except that it is a vigorous plant.

The second parent, which includes the blood of three other species, is my seedling No. 14255. This is one of a group of somewhat similar plants by crossing a plant of Otto Froebel with my seedling No. 5397.

My plants of Otto Froebel are not quite alike, as they are mostly seedlings, and these are not always identical with the parent, which is a plant allied, as I believe, to OFFICINALIS, having pink flowers of a good shade.

14255=

Otto Froebel

X No. 5397

No. 5397 is a cross between Mlokosewitschi and macrophylla (tomentosa). The flowers are pale yellow, the foliage very coarse, very light green. The odor of the leaves is faint and suggests cloves. The pollen is extraordinarily fertile and there is no difficulty in crossing this plant with an OFFICINALIS variety like Otto Froebel.

I have a strain of these crosses, Otto Froebel x 5397 which crossed with Chinese peonies represents the combination of the four species, Mlokosewitschi, macrophylla, officinalis and sinensis. The plants are sterile and the flowers are more uniform in character than one might expect. I have now about a hundred plants of this breeding, no two of which are really alike, but they are almost all of a certain type.

I will give the descriptions of several of them:

I have over two dozen of such plants which bloomed last spring and almost all of them looked good to me. Perhaps I am too favorably impressed by them; time will show. For the present there are not more than three or four plants of a kind, so they cannot be distributed yet for a few years. Each year increases and improves the stock.

Their season is about with the earlier hybrids of OFFICINALIS with SINENSIS. It is difficult to define the type, but as a rule the blooms are held up well and the colors are so novel that a group of them would be sure to attract notice.

The second cross of which I want to say something is not really new, although comparatively few peony growers have any first-hand experience with its results.

It is the cross TREE PEONY X PAEONIA LUTEA.

P. LUTEA is now well known to a number of peony growers. It is not yet in commerce on any considerable scale, and I am not sure that it will be, for the bloom is very small in comparison with most of ' the peonies and an inconspicuous flower, but it has a strong yellow color, and that makes it a valuable ; parent, for it imparts its yellow tone to large blooms that result from the Moutan parent.

The great Lemoine began work with PAEONIA LUTEA immediately after it was introduced to Western culture about 1884, and by the turn of the century, and for a few years thereafter, Lemoine introduced u. series of very remarkable hybrids, most of them with enormous blooms in yellow or sometimes stained with red. Souvenir de Maxime Cornu is perhaps the most striking of these varieties, and has become better known than any of the others.

Lemoines' introductions include the following varieties:

L'Esperance, 1909; La Lorraine, 1913; Mme. Louis Henry, (Henry 1919); Souvenir de Maxime Cornu (Henry 1919); Surprise, 1920; Satin Rouge, 1926; Chromatella, 1928; Aurore, 1936; Flambeau, 1930, Alice Harding, 1936; Sang Lorrain, 1939.

These varieties are almost all doubles. Apparently the French have preferred the double blooms. Among my seedlings quite a large number have been single, and I think they are not less beautiful, than the doubles. Here is a list of them up to the present:

Age of Gold, Amber Moon, Arcadia, Argosy, Banquet, Black Douglas, Black Panther, Black Pirate, Brocade, Canary, Centaur, Chinese Dragon, Coronal, Corsair, Countess, Damask, Daredevil, Festival, Golden Hind, Happy Days, Harlequin, Harvest, Holiday, Hyperion, Marchioness, Melody, Mystery, Narcissus, Open Your Eyes, Phoenix, Princess, Red Jade, Regent, Roman Gold, Silver Sails, Spanish, Gold, Spring Carnival, Stardust, Tea Rose, Thunderbolt, Trophy, Wings of the Morning.

There are a number of very beautiful things here, quite comparable with some of the finest French varieties.

It is not necessary to give in detail the marks of beauty on all of these, since they are being introduced to commerce as fast as I can get sufficient stock of them.

A large number of these have yellow as their ground color; some of the others are reds in various shades, and some of the dark-colored ones are deep red, almost approaching black.

This is unquestionably a valuable race, for it introduces new ranges of color among the peonies.

The season of these plants is a little later than that of the tree peonies, which run from about May 25 to the early days of June, while the LUTEA hybrids overlap them and cover the season from early June until about the beginning of the Chinese peonies, which usually start with me about June 10.

There are no other varieties to be considered outside of those of Lemoine and my own; no one else, so far as I know, has worked on this strain.