Perfect PEONIES
This much-extended plant family encompasses a huge variety of flowers, many fragrant, which range in colour from ghostly white through cream and lemon to lipstick pink, scarlet and deep red. It is no wonder, then, that peonies top the list of plants for adding dazzling splashes of colour to perennial borders in late spring and summer.
Ancient history
The sheer variety of these exquisite flowers comes from the hundreds of different cultivars that have been bred from the 25 or more species of peonies. Few flowers have such a long history, stretching back at least 4,000 years to an era when the wild Chinese peony was cultivated. The name derives from Paeon, physician to the Greek gods, and the medicinal properties of peony seeds and roots are mentioned in countless
