The Peony: From Ancient China to the Gardens of Malmaison

There is a moment in early summer when the peonies open all at once — great, extravagant blooms of pink and white and deep crimson, so full and heavy that they bow their stems toward the ground. It lasts perhaps two weeks. Then the petals fall, and the garden returns to green. This brevity is part of the peony's power: it gives everything, all at once, and then it is gone. It has been doing this, in gardens across the world, for more than two thousand years.

The Flower of China

The peony is native to Asia, Europe, and western North America, but it is in China that it has its deepest roots — both botanical and cultural. Paeonia lactiflora, the Chinese peony, has been cultivated in China for at least two thousand years, and Paeonia suffruticosa, the tree peony or Moutan, has been grown in Chinese imperial gardens since at least the Sui dynasty (581–618 AD). During the Tang dynasty (618–907 AD), the tree peony became the most celebrated flower in China — the subject of poetry, painting, and imperial decree, cultivated in the gardens of the palace at Chang'an with an intensity of devotion that bordered on obsession.

The Tang emperor Xuanzong is said to have planted ten thousand tree peonies in the imperial gardens, and the poet Li Bai — one of the greatest in the Chinese literary tradition — wrote three celebrated poems in praise of the peony and the imperial consort Yang Guifei, comparing the beauty of the flower to the beauty of the woman. The peony was called the “king of flowers” (huawang) and the “national flower” (guohua), and its cultivation was a matter of imperial prestige. Varieties were developed, named, and traded with the seriousness that Europeans would later bring to tulips and roses.

The peony also had a long history in Chinese medicine. The root of Paeonia lactiflora — known as bai shao (white peony root) — has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for at least two thousand years, prescribed for conditions ranging from menstrual disorders to liver disease to muscle cramps. The root of Paeonia suffruticosa — mu dan pi (tree peony bark) — was used as an anti-inflammatory and analgesic. The peony was, in the Chinese medical tradition, as much a medicine as a flower.

The Name and the Myth

The peony takes its name from Paeon, the physician of the Greek gods, who appears in Homer's Iliad as the healer who treats the wounds of Ares and Hades. According to one version of the myth, Paeon was a student of Asclepius, the god of medicine, who became jealous of his pupil's skill and threatened to kill him. Zeus saved Paeon by transforming him into the flower that bears his name. In another version, Paeon discovered the peony on Mount Olympus, where it had been shown to him by Leto, the mother of Apollo and Artemis, and used it to heal Pluto's wounds.

The medicinal associations of the peony in the Western tradition are as old as its mythological ones. Theophrastus, the Greek botanist who was a student of Aristotle, described the peony in his Historia Plantarum (c. 350 BC) and noted its use as a remedy for various ailments. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century AD, listed more than twenty medical uses for the peony root, including treatments for epilepsy, kidney disease, and nightmares. The peony was one of the most important medicinal plants of the ancient and medieval world, and its cultivation in monastery gardens across Europe was driven as much by its pharmaceutical value as by its beauty.

The Peony Comes to Europe

The European peony — Paeonia officinalis — is native to southern Europe and has been cultivated since antiquity. But it was the arrival of the Chinese and tree peonies that transformed European horticulture. Paeonia lactiflora was introduced to Europe in the eighteenth century, initially through the trade routes of the East India companies, and its larger, more fragrant blooms quickly eclipsed the native European species in the gardens of the wealthy. The tree peony — Paeonia suffruticosa, the Moutan — arrived in Britain in 1787, when Sir Joseph Banks arranged for a specimen to be brought from China to Kew Gardens. It caused a sensation.

The Moutan peony was unlike anything European gardeners had seen: a woody shrub rather than an herbaceous perennial, with flowers of extraordinary size and complexity — some varieties producing blooms thirty centimetres across, in colours ranging from pure white to deep purple, with petals of a silken delicacy that seemed almost impossible in a garden plant. It was expensive, difficult to cultivate, and intensely fashionable, and it spread rapidly through the gardens of the European aristocracy in the early nineteenth century.

Malmaison and the Empress

No garden in the history of European horticulture was more important to the peony's European career than Malmaison — the château outside Paris that Empress Joséphine Bonaparte purchased in 1799 and transformed, over the following decade, into the most celebrated garden in the world. Joséphine was a passionate and knowledgeable gardener, and she used the resources of the Napoleonic empire — its trade networks, its diplomatic connections, its military reach — to assemble a collection of plants that was without parallel in Europe.

The peonies of Malmaison were among Joséphine's greatest horticultural achievements. She cultivated both the Chinese peony and the Moutan tree peony with particular devotion, and she commissioned Pierre-Joseph Redouté — her court artist and the greatest botanical illustrator of the age — to document them with the same precision and beauty that he brought to her roses. Redouté's peony illustrations, published in his Choix des plus belles fleurs (Selection of the Most Beautiful Flowers, 1827–1833) and in his contributions to the Traité des arbres et arbustes, are among the finest botanical illustrations ever made: stipple-engraved plates of extraordinary delicacy, capturing the silken texture of the petals, the complexity of the stamens, the subtle gradations of colour from deep rose to blush pink to cream.

Redouté and the Raphael of Flowers

Pierre-Joseph Redouté (1759–1840) was born in the Belgian Ardennes and came to Paris as a young man to study painting. He found his vocation in botanical illustration, and he developed a stipple-engraving technique of extraordinary refinement — building up tone and texture through thousands of tiny dots rather than lines, achieving a softness and luminosity that was entirely his own. He became court artist to Queen Marie Antoinette, survived the Revolution, and went on to serve Empress Joséphine, whose passion for flowers gave him the subjects and the patronage that produced his greatest work.

Redouté's Les Roses (1817–1824) is his most famous work, but his peony illustrations — particularly the Pivoine de la Chine (Plate 071 from Choix des plus belles fleurs) and the Moutan peony from the Traité des arbres et arbustes — are among his finest achievements. The Pivoine de la Chine plate captures the Chinese peony's full, abundant blooms in Redouté's signature palette of deep rose, blush pink, and cream, with a botanical accuracy and artistic elegance that has never been surpassed. It is a portrait of a flower that is also a portrait of an era — of the Napoleonic court's passion for beauty, science, and the natural world.

The Peony Today

The peony remains one of the most beloved flowers in the world. It is the state flower of Indiana, the national flower of China (alongside the plum blossom), and one of the most popular cut flowers in contemporary floristry. Thousands of cultivars have been developed since the nineteenth century, in colours ranging from pure white to near-black, in forms from the simple single to the extravagant double and the architectural Japanese form. The tree peony — the Moutan that caused such a sensation when it arrived at Kew in 1787 — is now grown in gardens across the temperate world, in varieties that Joséphine and Redouté would have found extraordinary.

But the peony's essential character has not changed. It is still a flower of extravagance and brevity, of abundance and transience. It still gives everything at once, and then it is gone. And it still rewards the kind of close, devoted attention that Redouté brought to it in the gardens of Malmaison — the attention that reveals, in the layered petals and the complex stamens and the subtle gradations of colour, a beauty that is inexhaustible.

Our Peonies Journal reproduces Redouté's 1827 peony illustrations — the Moutan tree peony and the Pivoine de la Chine — set against a deep dark blue background that gives these masterpieces of botanical art the drama and presence they deserve.

References
Brent Elliott (2001). The Royal Horticultural Society: A History 1804–2004. Phillimore.
Fletcher, H. R. (1969). The Story of the Royal Horticultural Society 1804–1968. Oxford University Press.
Haw, S. G. (2001). The Moutan or Tree Peony. The New Plantsman.
Painter, J. (2015). The Empress of Fashion: A Life of Joséphine de Beauharnais. Bloomsbury.
Stern, F. C. (1946). A Study of the Genus Paeonia. Royal Horticultural Society.