25 MARCH 2000, Page 45

A beauty as tough as old boots

Henry Hobhouse

PEONIES by Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall Weidenfeld, £30, pp. 384 This fine book answers several needs. It tells the history of the plant which stretched in the wild from Japan to the Mediterranean, with one unimportant native in the Americas. After early plant transfer, peonies were to be found all over China, Korea and Japan, and they became important cultivars, valued for medication and for their beauty in the garden and an inspiration for art outside horticulture, to be found in textiles, ceramics and paint- ings. Discovered by Dutch, then English traders in China and Japan, the peony went through the same process in Europe as in the Orient, becoming a flower to make gar- dens works of art and then to become a stimulant for non-garden artists, one of the earlier being Albrecht Diirer (1471-1528). He painted a portrait of Paeonia Officinalis, the only peony native to West- ern Europe, a plant once much used as a sedative, its seeds and roots promoting, it is said, sleep. But in this litigious age, please don't, as they say, try this at home. The author has written more than a cele- bration of an exquisite plant or an illustrat- ed art-history, though both have been well done. More than half the book is devoted to the practical gardener's selection, pur- chase and culture of peonies, complete even with names and addresses of nursery- men, peony specialists in 11 countries. She has also included a list of peony gardens in many countries, including China and Japan, where peonies are often an impor- tant element in the design of urban parks and gardens. The only criticism is that, like some cookbooks that are too gorgeous to take into the kitchen, so this is too beauti- ful for the garden or for the average gar- dener's ingrained hands. It should be held, pure and pristine, in a mobile lectern, as used by preachers in the American West in the 19th century.

Peonies are mostly herbaceous, but a minority are so-called tree peonies — a misnomer, since few ever reach a height of 7-8 ft. Tree peonies are less hardy than the herbaceous, whose growth dies down every autumn, and whose living cells are largely protected from frost by the good earth. Tree peonies also need more shade in the heat of the summer since these are plants that in nature typically thrive under forest trees on fairly sharply drained mountain- sides.

For the non-gardener, this book is still a joy. There are elegant photographs of examples of growing flowers, caught by the cameraman at their best. There are repre- sentations of the peony in art, including an early Chinese lacquered dish, made about 1430, and a lovely peony painting inspired by a Tang dynasty poem. In Europe, the love of chinoiserie that followed the tea trade, involved peony fashions and here is illustrated an 18th-century wallpaper from Belvoir as well as Matthew Digby Wyatt's designs for the Great Exhibition of 1851. The flower was chosen by the Dowager Empress Ci Xi (1835-1908) as the national flower of China, a beneficent act that con- trasts with her ambivalent conduct during the Boxer rebellion.

But to love living peonies is to grow them, and the author recommends meth- ods, from the extensive to the humble, from a grand peony walk to a mere pot. Tough as old boots, peonies survive a lot of bad weather and even maltreatment, though, like most plants, they prefer to be cherished. There are ten listed peony nurs- eries in the UK, one in Scotland, two in Somerset. One of the latter, Kelways, used to be so well regarded that it boasted a sid- ing on the old Great Western main line to receive special carriages from miles away. Today, nearly everyone arrives by car, and the trains thunder past at over 100 mph at the bottom of what the locals still call the Peony Valley.

Drawings made by Chinese artists in the 1820s for John Reeves of the British East India Company.