Few flowers carry as much history as the peony. For more than two thousand years, this extraordinary bloom has been cultivated, revered, painted, prescribed, and gifted across civilisations on opposite sides of the world. The peony predates the rose as a garden flower in China by centuries, inspired some of the greatest art ever made in East Asia, crossed continents through trade routes and colonial botany, and today sits comfortably as one of the most beloved cut flowers in the world — arriving at peak beauty just in time for Mother’s Day every May. This is its story.
Ancient Origins: Medicine Before Beauty
The peony’s journey begins not in a garden but in a pharmacy.
The genus Paeonia takes its name from Paeon, the physician to the Greek gods in Homer’s Iliad, who is said to have used the plant’s roots to heal Pluto’s wounds. Whether or not Paeon was real, the attribution tells us something important: from the very beginning of recorded Western history, the peony was understood first as a medicinal plant rather than an ornamental one.
Greek physicians including Theophrastus (371–287 BCE), often called the father of botany, documented the peony as a powerful healing herb. Its seeds, roots, and dried flowers were prescribed for a remarkable range of conditions: epilepsy, kidney disorders, nightmares, menstrual irregularities, and jaundice, among others. The Roman physician Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE) catalogued it in his Naturalis Historia as one of the oldest known plants used by mankind, noting that it had to be harvested at night to avoid a woodpecker that, according to superstition, would attack anyone who dug its roots in daylight.
In the European Middle Ages, peonies were cultivated almost exclusively in monastery gardens, where monks maintained them as medicinal plants alongside other herbs. They appear in Charlemagne’s 812 CE Capitulare de Villis, an imperial decree that listed plants to be grown on royal estates — an early European record of intentional peony cultivation. The dried seeds were strung into necklaces worn by children as protection against evil spirits, and the roots were used in treatments for everything from liver complaints to madness.
This medicinal tradition persisted in Europe well into the 17th century. It was not until the Renaissance, when gardens began to be understood as places of beauty and pleasure rather than purely of utility, that peonies began to be grown for their flowers.
Imperial China: The King of Flowers
While Europe was stringing peony seeds into amulets, China was cultivating an entirely different relationship with the flower — one of reverence, artistry, and obsession that has no parallel in any other culture’s history with a single plant.
Tree peonies (Paeonia suffruticosa) were first cultivated in China during the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE), initially also for medicinal use. The root bark — mu dan pi — remains part of traditional Chinese medicine to this day, used as an anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial agent. But within a few centuries, the aesthetic qualities of the tree peony had begun to eclipse its pharmaceutical value in the Chinese imagination.
It was during the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) that the peony was elevated to its supreme cultural position. Emperor Xuanzong (reigned 712–756 CE) is credited with transforming the imperial gardens at Chang’an into peony paradises, planting thousands of cultivars and making the flower fashionable among the aristocracy. The Tang dynasty poet Bai Juyi wrote that in spring, the whole city of Chang’an was “crazy for peonies” — merchants would travel hundreds of miles to see famous specimens, and a single exceptional plant could sell for the price of a house. This was not mere enthusiasm; it was a cultural phenomenon as intense as Dutch tulip mania, but with a longer history and deeper artistic legacy.
The Tang-era fascination with peonies set the tone for everything that followed. Court painters were commissioned to document prized cultivars. Poems were written comparing peony blooms to imperial concubines, clouds, and the moon. The flower became embedded in the symbolic language of Chinese culture: peonies represented wealth, honour, and feminine beauty. The phrase mu dan became a byword for elegance and a common name for girls. Red peonies symbolised passionate love; white ones, purity and refinement.
During the Song dynasty (960–1279 CE), the city of Luoyang in Henan province became the peony capital of the world. Luoyang gardeners developed hundreds of named cultivars — the first systematic breeding programme for peonies anywhere on earth — and the city’s annual peony festival attracted visitors from across China. The scholar Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072 CE) wrote a monograph on Luoyang peonies, the Luoyang Mudan Ji, which is one of the earliest horticultural treatises on any flower in history. It catalogued dozens of named varieties, described cultivation techniques, and documented the social rituals surrounding peony viewing. Luoyang still holds one of the world’s great peony festivals today, visited by millions of people each spring.
The Qing dynasty (1644–1912 CE) saw imperial peony cultivation reach its most elaborate expression. The gardens of Beijing’s Summer Palace and the imperial estates at Chengde contained thousands of peonies in hundreds of varieties. The peony appeared on porcelain, embroidery, lacquerwork, and painting with a frequency that made it the most depicted flower in Chinese decorative arts — a distinction it arguably still holds.
Japan: Refinement and the Temple Garden
The tree peony arrived in Japan from China, most likely during the Nara period (710–794 CE), brought by Buddhist monks along with medicinal knowledge. As in China, it entered Japan first as a pharmaceutical plant — the root bark was incorporated into kampo, traditional Japanese herbal medicine — but the aesthetic dimension followed quickly.
Japanese gardeners developed their own peony aesthetic, distinct from the Chinese: where Chinese cultivars tended toward maximum size and extravagance, Japanese breeders refined the flower toward elegance and structural clarity. The Japanese anemone-form peony, with its wide outer guard petals and distinctive central boss of narrow petaloids, emerged from Japanese breeding programmes and became the defining form associated with Japanese peony culture.
Temple gardens were the primary setting for peony cultivation in Japan. The most famous peony garden in Japan is at Hase-dera temple in Nara, which has maintained continuous peony cultivation for over 1,200 years and today displays more than 7,000 plants across 150 varieties. The Ueno Tosho-gu Peony Garden in Tokyo, established in the Edo period, continues to draw visitors every spring. In Japanese art, peonies appear alongside tigers in ink paintings — the tiger being an emblem of masculine power, the peony of feminine beauty, their pairing representing the balance of nature.
The Edo period (1603–1868) brought a flourishing of commercial peony cultivation in Japan, with specialist growers developing new cultivars and publishing illustrated guides to named varieties — early horticultural publishing that reflected genuine public appetite for peony knowledge.
The Silk Road and the Westward Journey
The herbaceous peony species native to Europe and Western Asia — principally Paeonia officinalis, Paeonia lactiflora, and various Mediterranean species — had been known in Europe since antiquity. But the sophisticated Chinese tree peony and the refined lactiflora cultivars that would form the backbone of modern Western peony breeding were unknown in Europe until trade routes and diplomacy brought them west.
Paeonia lactiflora, the species from which most modern garden peonies descend, is native to northern China, Siberia, and Mongolia. It arrived in European gardens in the late 18th century, brought by plant hunters and diplomats operating along the expanding boundaries of European contact with East Asia.
The British East India Company and its French equivalent played significant roles in moving plants westward. Sir Joseph Banks, the great naturalist who sailed with Captain Cook and later directed Kew Gardens, was instrumental in facilitating the introduction of Chinese plants to European cultivation. By the early 19th century, Chinese lactiflora peonies were being grown in England and France, and the response from European gardeners was electric.
19th Century France: The Golden Age of Peony Breeding
The story of the modern garden peony is substantially a French story, and its central chapter was written in a suburb of Paris in the first half of the 19th century.
Nicolas Lémon, a nurseryman working in Paris in the 1820s and 1830s, began systematic hybridisation of lactiflora peonies — crossing Chinese cultivars with one another and with European species to produce new forms and colours. His work established the technical foundation for peony breeding, but it was his successors who produced the varieties that changed the world.
Jacques-Louis Désirée Calot (1817–1875), Auguste Dessert (1830–1901), and above all Victor Lemoine (1823–1911) turned French horticulture into a peony powerhouse. Lemoine’s nursery at Nancy produced an extraordinary catalogue of new peony cultivars over several decades, many of which remain in cultivation today. His most celebrated introduction, ‘Duchesse de Nemours’ (1856), is still one of the finest white peonies ever bred and remains commercially grown over 165 years after its introduction. ‘Festiva Maxima’ (1851), introduced by Miellez and still considered a benchmark for white double peonies, comes from the same French breeding tradition.
‘Sarah Bernhardt’, the peony that would become the most commercially cultivated peony in the world, was introduced by Victor Lemoine’s firm in 1906, named for the great French actress at the peak of her celebrity. Its combination of exceptional stem length, large fragrant blooms, and outstanding performance as a cut flower made it commercially dominant within decades — and it has never been dethroned.
The French breeders understood something important: they were not simply producing flowers for gardens, but creating varieties that could be cut and sold. Their instinct for commercial viability as well as beauty shaped the direction of peony breeding toward the qualities — long stems, dense double blooms, strong fragrance, cold-storage tolerance — that define the cut-flower peony trade to this day.
Britain and the Royal Horticultural Society
Britain was not far behind France in peony enthusiasm. The Royal Horticultural Society began receiving Chinese peony cultivars from the late 18th century onward and quickly became a centre of peony knowledge. The RHS Lindley Library holds some of the earliest European botanical illustrations of Chinese peonies, documenting cultivars that arrived via the Canton trade.
British plant hunters made extraordinary contributions to peony knowledge. Robert Fortune (1812–1880), who famously smuggled tea plants out of China for the East India Company in one of the great botanical espionage stories of the 19th century, also collected peony specimens and seeds during his travels and contributed significantly to British knowledge of Chinese cultivation techniques. Fortune noted that in Chinese gardens, peonies were staked, sheltered, and tended with a level of individual care that European gardeners rarely gave any plant — each bloom sometimes shaded with its own small paper umbrella to protect the petals from direct sun.
The RHS awarded its prestigious Award of Garden Merit to peonies throughout the 20th century, helping standardise quality expectations and guide the commercial market. Today the RHS maintains an extensive peony trial garden and continues to evaluate new cultivars.
America: A New World Obsession
Peonies arrived in North America with European settlers, and by the 19th century they were common in farmhouse gardens throughout the northeastern United States and Canada. Their extraordinary cold-hardiness — most herbaceous peonies thrive in USDA Zones 3–8, tolerating winters of -40°F — made them perfect for the harsh climates of the American Midwest and Northeast, where few other ornamental plants so dependable bloomed so magnificently.
The American Peony Society was founded in 1903, one of the earliest specialist plant societies in the United States, reflecting the genuine depth of interest in peony cultivation that had developed by the turn of the 20th century. The Society began registering peony cultivars — creating an official record of named varieties — which helped standardise the rapidly expanding commercial market.
American breeders made their own distinctive contributions to peony development. Professor A.P. Saunders (1869–1953) of Clinton, New York, spent decades crossing species peonies to create entirely new hybrid forms. His work introduced fresh colours and growth habits not previously available in garden peonies, and many of his cultivars — ‘Cytherea’, ‘Coral Charm’, and others — became landmarks of 20th-century breeding.
The Midwest became the heartland of commercial peony growing in America. States including Michigan, Iowa, and Indiana developed large-scale peony farms supplying cut flowers to urban markets, and the peony became deeply embedded in the culture of those regions. In many Midwestern towns, peonies planted in the late 19th century on farmhouse properties still bloom reliably each May — living evidence of the plant’s extraordinary longevity and its deep roots in American domestic life.
The connection between peonies and Memorial Day (the last Monday of May) became firmly established in American culture by the early 20th century, when peony blooms were used to decorate Civil War graves. The timing of the bloom in most American climate zones made peonies the natural flower of late May commemoration, and they became almost as closely associated with Memorial Day as the poppy is with Remembrance Day in Britain.
The 20th Century: Intersectional Hybrids and New Frontiers
The most significant botanical breakthrough in peony breeding in the 20th century was the development of the intersectional hybrid — a cross between herbaceous and tree peonies that had been thought essentially impossible.
Japanese breeder Toichi Itoh (1913–1956) spent years attempting to cross the herbaceous lactiflora peony with the tree peony, seeking to combine the hardiness and vigour of the former with the extraordinary colours and longer bloom season of the latter. He finally succeeded in 1948, producing a small number of seeds from the cross. Itoh died before his hybrids flowered. After his death, his widow and a fellow breeder named Shigeru Oshida tended the seedlings, and when they finally bloomed they revealed something remarkable: large, fully double yellow flowers — a colour essentially unavailable in herbaceous peonies — on sturdy, low-growing plants that did not require staking and bloomed for weeks rather than days.
American peony enthusiast Louis Smirnow acquired rights to Itoh’s original seedlings in the early 1970s and introduced four cultivars to Western commerce. They caused immediate excitement among peony specialists, but were initially so expensive — individual plants sold for hundreds of dollars — that they remained curiosities rather than commercial staples.
It was the work of American breeder Roger Anderson (1936–2015) of Wisconsin that truly opened up the Itoh peony to the wider world. Anderson spent decades making new Itoh crosses, dramatically expanding the colour range and flower forms available, and his cultivar ‘Bartzella’ (introduced 1986) became the defining Itoh peony: enormous, fully double, luminously yellow, intensely fragrant, and vigorous enough to grow reliably in a wide range of conditions. ‘Bartzella’ broke the hundred-dollar price barrier for peonies in ways that shocked even the specialist trade, but demand remained strong enough to sustain premium pricing for years.
Today, Itoh peonies are widely available and moderately priced, and they represent the most exciting area of active peony breeding. New cultivars appear each year in shades of yellow, gold, copper, and soft red that were previously impossible in herbaceous forms.
Peonies in Art and Culture
Throughout their long history, peonies have inspired some of the most beautiful art ever made.
In China, the peony is the subject of a continuous artistic tradition stretching back over a thousand years. The ink-and-wash peony paintings of the Song dynasty established compositional conventions — the partially opened bloom, the heavy petal pressing downward, the leaf spray cutting diagonally across the flower — that remain influential in Chinese painting today. Porcelain painters of the Ming and Qing dynasties elevated the peony to perhaps its greatest decorative expression: the blue-and-white and famille rose peonies that cover imperial Chinese porcelain are among the most recognisable and beloved images in the history of decorative art.
In Japan, Ogata Kōrin’s folding screens depicting red and white peonies (early 18th century) are among the masterworks of Japanese decorative painting. Peony motifs appear throughout the textile traditions of both China and Japan, woven into silk, embroidered onto ceremonial garments, and printed on paper.
Western art engaged with the peony more modestly. Dutch Golden Age flower paintings include peonies among the blooms assembled in those grand imaginary bouquets — real compositions being impossible since the depicted flowers bloom at different times of year. Édouard Manet painted peonies with particular feeling; his studio at Gennevilliers had a garden full of them, and his peony paintings from the 1860s and 1870s capture the flowers with an informality and directness that feels completely modern. Pierre-Joseph Redouté, the great botanical illustrator who painted roses for Empress Joséphine, also produced some of the finest European botanical illustrations of peonies.
In literature, the peony appears throughout Chinese and Japanese poetry as a symbol of spring, feminine beauty, and transient pleasure. In English literature it is less prominent, but William Wordsworth and other Romantic poets mention it approvingly, and the Edwardian garden writers — Gertrude Jekyll, Vita Sackville-West — wrote about peonies with real passion.
Peonies and Mother’s Day: A Natural Union
The association between peonies and Mother’s Day is partly accidental and partly inevitable. Anna Jarvis, who campaigned for the official establishment of Mother’s Day in the United States (it was officially recognised in 1914), chose the white carnation as her personal symbol for the holiday — her own mother’s favourite flower. But the peony, blooming at precisely the right moment in the calendar across most temperate regions, steadily claimed its own role in Mother’s Day culture through the simple authority of timing.
By the mid-20th century, peonies had become one of the definitive Mother’s Day flowers across the United States, Britain, and Australia, their May bloom season making them naturally available at the moment they were most wanted. The emotional qualities long associated with peonies — beauty, abundance, luxury, love — aligned perfectly with what people wanted to express to their mothers. The fragrance alone, among the most complex and beautiful of any garden flower, communicates care and generosity in a way few other flowers can match.
Today, peony production for the global cut-flower market is a major industry. The Netherlands, the world’s flower trading capital, imports peony stems from growers in Chile, New Zealand, and Kenya during the off-season months, ensuring year-round availability. But the peak of peony season — May and early June — remains the moment when demand surges and the flower is at its absolute best, and that peak has become inseparable from the rituals of Mother’s Day in cultures around the world.
The Peony Today: Conservation and New Breeding
The 21st century has brought a new dimension to peony culture: conservation.
Of approximately 33 wild Paeonia species recognised by botanists, many are now threatened in their native habitats by land clearance, overcollection of roots for traditional medicine, and climate change. Paeonia cambessedesii, native only to the Balearic Islands, and Paeonia corsica are among the species of conservation concern. Botanic gardens including Kew, the Edinburgh Royal Botanic Garden, and the Beijing Botanical Garden maintain living collections of wild species peonies and seed bank accessions as insurance against loss.
At the same time, breeding continues at an extraordinary pace. New cultivars are registered with the American Peony Society every year — currently over 6,000 named varieties exist in the registry. Itoh breeding has opened up colour ranges that would have seemed impossible fifty years ago. Reblooming peonies — varieties that flower more than once in a season — are an active area of development, though true repeat-blooming remains elusive.
Cut-flower production has expanded globally. Colombia, New Zealand, Kenya, and China have all emerged as significant peony-growing nations for the international market, complementing the traditional production centres of the Netherlands and the United States. Improved cold-chain logistics mean that fresh peony blooms are available to consumers in more places and for more of the year than ever before.
The ancient Chinese dream of a flower that combined maximum beauty with enduring cultural meaning has, it turns out, translated perfectly to the modern world. Two thousand years after Chinese physicians first cultivated peonies for their roots, and a century after Victor Lemoine named a pink double peony after a French actress, the peony remains exactly what it has always been: one of the most magnificent flowers in human cultivation, and a gift worth giving.
A Timeline of Peony History
c. 900 BCE — Wild peonies used medicinally in China and Greece.
c. 300 BCE — Theophrastus documents the peony in the first systematic Western botanical writing.
77 CE — Pliny the Elder writes about peony cultivation and folklore in Naturalis Historia.
618–907 CE — Tang dynasty: peonies become the imperial flower of China; Chang’an peony mania peaks.
710–794 CE — Tree peonies arrive in Japan from China.
812 CE — Charlemagne’s Capitulare de Villis lists peonies among plants to be cultivated on royal estates.
960–1279 CE — Song dynasty: Luoyang becomes the peony capital of the world; Ouyang Xiu writes the first peony monograph.
c. 1600s — Peonies begin to be grown ornamentally in European gardens; previously grown only as medicinal plants.
Late 1700s — Paeonia lactiflora arrives in European gardens; the foundation of modern peony breeding is laid.
1851 — ‘Festiva Maxima’ introduced in France; still one of the finest white peonies in cultivation.
1856 — ‘Duchesse de Nemours’ introduced by Calot; still commercially grown today.
1860s–1870s — Manet paints peonies in his Paris studio.
1903 — American Peony Society founded.
1906 — ‘Sarah Bernhardt’ introduced by Lemoine; becomes the world’s most commercially cultivated peony.
1914 — Mother’s Day established as a US national holiday.
1948 — Toichi Itoh achieves the first successful herbaceous-tree peony cross in Japan.
1974 — Itoh’s intersectional hybrids introduced to Western commerce by Louis Smirnow.
1986 — Roger Anderson introduces ‘Bartzella’, the landmark yellow Itoh peony.
2003 — Luoyang Peony Festival registers over 10 million visitors.
Present — Over 6,000 named peony cultivars registered; global cut-flower trade makes peonies available year-round; Itoh breeding continues to expand colour range.
From the physicians of ancient Greece to the imperial gardens of Tang dynasty China, from the nurseries of 19th-century France to the cut-flower farms of Kenya and New Zealand, the peony has accumulated more human love and attention than almost any other flower. To give peonies on Mother’s Day is to participate, knowingly or not, in one of the oldest and most beautiful traditions in the history of gardening.