Paeonia 2013

[Catwheazle]

Oh, great. Thanks for the link to the article! 
Peonies are - it seems to me - verifiable real "adventure" ;-)

Bernd

[Matt]

after HOY now GREENSPAN...more beautiful obovatas...it is a torture for me!

AMAZING!

M.

[Hoy]

Hi Leena, thank you for your suggestion. I have actually two plants and they are quite similar except for the other one having slightly smaller leaflets and flowers, on the other hand it bears the flowers higher above the foliage. I haven't checked the indumentum yet!I get some good seeds every year. If you are interested I can send you some when they are ripe.

Thank you Matt and Catwheazle!

Here are some more pictures. The yellow flowers of lutea ludlowii almost disappear at a distance, you have to come close to enjoy them. The plant is 3.5 x 4,5 m and about 25 years old. I had to remove a lot of stems on the garden side,as other plants suffocated underneath the dense canopy.
 
Today it is about 25 open flowers on the rockii cv.

[Hoy]

The pictures of rockii wouldn't come along.

[Leena]

My P.obovata subsp willmottiae was bought from Carsten Burkhadt (www.paeon.de) in 2006, I don't know it's ploidy, but it has very hairy undersides of the leaves and I trust the seller.

[greenspan]

leena, yes of course, i also trust burkhardt. i guess he is very knowledgeable about peonies. he did a great work, gathering all informations he could get about the genus and making his extraordinary paeonia web poject. when i ever need informations about peonies, i use his knowledge base. unfortunately it seems, that he changed his interests and doesn't work any longer on his project (maybe i'm wrong). but informations are the one side, the other side is to draw conclusions. and this is what i try to do. if i'm wrong, i guess people find out, contribute new arguments and correct my conclusions. this is what i understand as a fruitful discussion. trusting is no argument.

i asked my son to get the whole article of Hong about the obovata, because it seems, that Hong made pictures of the leaf indumentum grades. these pictures are missing in Hong's text at burkhardt's website. to get scientific papers like Hong's article, you must have a fee-based access to springer or other publishers. universities have such accesses and my son studies in switzerland at ETH.

is it possible to show a foto of the lower leaf surface of your obovata? please try to do so to compare with mine. i'll check my other obovata, whether i can find differences in the grade of leaf indumentum. i'm quite sure, that i have none obovata with glabrous indumentum at the lower leaf surface. it won't help on to classify a subspecies rank, but it's just for interest, if differences would be seen.

[Leena]

is it possible to show a foto of the lower leaf surface of your obovata? please try to do so to compare with mine. i'll check my other obovata, whether i can find differences in the grade of leaf indumentum. .

I will try to take photos tomorrow. 
I don't know if I succeed, because I don't have macro lens and the hairs are so small, but I will try when there is more light tomorrow.

[Leena]

I tried to take photos of the undersides of the leaves of P.obovata yesterday, but here is first yet another P.obovata. This is a second generation from wild, the seeds for the mother plant of my plant were collected from Mt Changbai, China, by Helsinki University Expedition. This is very different from other P.obovatas I have, the biggest difference is that it comes up and flowers about two to three weeks later than the other P.obovatas and P.obovata subsp willmottiae. This is typical for it also in other gardens where I know it grows. It is altogether more slender plant, the undersides of the leaves are almost glabrous, the flowers are quite small, much smaller than the flowers of other P.obovatas, and they keep their round shape most of the time. As garden plants I think the other P.obovatas, and especially P.obovata subsp willmottiae, are better. 
The first picture was taken June 1st, when my other pink P.obovatas were already past flowering, and P.obovata subsp willmottiae had just opened it's flowers.
The flowering pictures were taken couple of days ago, June 10th.

[Leena]

The photos of the undersides are not very good, my apologies  . I would have needed a macro lens to have closer pictures, but at least you can see the differences in the hairs around the big veins.
I have four different P.obovata.
No 1 is P.obovata subsp willmottiae, most hairy undersides of the leaves
No 2 is early pink flowering P.obovata, grown from seed, less hairs than no 1
No 3 is late flowering slender P.obovata, seeds second generation from the wild, almost no hairs
No 4 is early flowering pink P.obovata, tall and very robust P.obovata, grown from seed, hairs about the same as no 2. They are also close to each other in other ways, the habitus, size and habitus of flowers, only this plant is more robust than no 2, but it might be due to the place it grows. The origin of the seeds for no 2 and 4 is different.

[greenspan]

thx leena for the leaves pics. they are good enough to see the hairs on the lower surface of the leaves. i didn't photograph mine. they show the same range of leaf indumentum like yours. yet another i found a specimen with glabrous leaf. didn't flower till now, but a chinese origin. got wrong labelled as "P. sterniana'. if you are interested...here a map of the distribution area of obovata with notes on the ploidy-level + range of leaf indumentum from hongs article. quite interesting i think.

the different flowering time depends to the specific climate i think. my first two specimen of obovata from china had the same habitus, flower shape etc. but the one flowered 2 weeks before the other. my first thought was, that this must have to be an adaption to the specific climate, where the plant comes from. e.g. your very late flowering obovata from changbai mt. range is a cold area i guess (border between china, north korea + russia). so the plants there have to flower late...maybe that's the reason for this behaviour.

[Leena]

You may be right about the flowering time correlating to the original place it grows.
Thank you for the link to the map.

[chasw]

I wonder if anyone can help identify this tree paeony broken off in the high winds yesterday its first and only flower so far,apologies for the poor photo its one of these new fangled phones

[Hans J]

Chasw ,

this could be "Souvenir de Maxime Cornu" ...one of the first hybrids of tree peonies

Hans

[chasw]

Thanks Hans ,will google that and see what it comes up with

[Maggi Young]

Some forum links to "Souvenir de Maxime Cornu"  - looks like this one to me - a very glamorous lady she is, too!
http://www.srgc.net/forum/index.php?topic=1690.msg45680#msg45680
http://www.srgc.net/forum/index.php?topic=3446.msg95738#msg95738
http://www.srgc.net/forum/index.php?topic=4975.msg153366#msg153366