Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Yellow peonies

Paeonia 'High Noon'
The yellow peony collection gets better year by year. There was a nice surprise in this department this year: a peony bought in 2009 as a tiny thing out of tissue culture and labeled 'First Arrival' bloomed for the first time this year. But it isn't 'First Arrival' : it's 'Bartzella'. Now there are two plants of 'Bartzella' in the collection, although the other one has yet to bloom and perhaps it, too, will have a surprise for me.

Here's the current line-up, which includes herbaceous peonies, Itoh hybrids (partially woody) and tree peony hybrids.

This first one is the newly revealed 'Bartzella', an intersectional hybrid, sometimes confusingly called an Itoh hybrid, although it was raised by Roger Anderson , not by Itoh.

Paeonia 'Bartzella' 

The identity of this next one is not yet resolved: it came labeled Kinshi ( which should be 'Chromatella' but so far the flower does not resemble 'Chromatella').
Paeonia incertae sedis 

Here's 'Yellow Crown', maybe my favorite of these. This one is a hybrid raised by Itoh. The flower shown is about to fall apart.

Paeonia 'Yellow Crown'

The flower color of this next one, 'Roselette's Child', seems to depend a lot on temperature. It can be white, white with a peachy glow, or, rarely, the yellow you see here.

Paeonia 'Roselette's Child'

This next one is grand old 'Souvenir de Maxime Cornu'; this was probably the first lutea hybrid peony ever raised, and is now over a century old.
Paeonia 'Souvenir de Maxime Cornu' 

And here, again,  is  A. P. Saunders' 'High Noon', still, a half-century after it was raised, the only one of Saunders' hybrids to be widely available.

Paeonia 'High Noon'

And finally, a later addition: after I published this post, I realized that I had not included Paeonia 'Garden Treasure', Don Hollingworth's entry among the intersectional (Itoh) peonies. This has grown here since 2007, and was the first of the intersectional yellows to bloom here. Take a look:

Paeonia 'Garden Treasure' 
Paeonia 'Garden Treasure' 

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Thank you for this lovely and informative post. Such beautiful peonies!