Didn’t expect it anymore, but apparently the third volume from Hong De-Yuan’s books on peonies is in print. The species classification is about to have an update.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jse.12688![]()
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@bobjohnson I think they simply took two plants from different locations. Even within species there are small differences, both between different locations and probably, though smaller, also between plants in the same population. If you would stand before a population of such a species and could take home whatever you’d like, I guess we’d all go for those ones that look somewhat healthier and larger than the others. The different plants from the species are always close to one another on the diagram, so I wouldn’t pay much attention to that. The most remarkable thing is that they place P. brownii and P. californica now simply under the herbaceous group instead of separate from the others. As far as I know any external crosses with them have always failed (except for one seed with P. peregrina, that germinated, but eventually died). They are herbaceous of course, as they have no woody stems and die back, so perhaps there is something to say for it, I don’t know, I’m no botanist.
We have Brownii growing locally in the forests here, but despite it living at a higher altitude than my house, it blooms very early – much before the herbaceous hybrids at my home bloom. If one wanted to try hybridizing it, you’d pretty much need to have it growing on your own property I think, so you could keep track of the exact time that the flowers opened. The thing is really quite short, and the flowers are down-facing, which means you’d probably need to be laying on the ground in the wet spring dirt when you were doing pollination . Ann Oveson was the one person I know of who had it growing wild all over her property in Wallowa Oregon. Wallawa is located far away from any population center, and while she and I corresponded by mail in the pre-internet days, very few people ever made it out to her home. She claimed to have made a lot of efforts with Brownii, but by the time I got to see her in person years later, she was suffering from the beginnings of dementia, and was not shy in admitting that she had lost her memories for the work she had done. I think she felt that she had a few plants from Brownii, and may have shared some pictures of them to the old Yahoo Peony Group, but if I remember correctly, the few pictures of these that I saw looked pretty much like regular lactiflora types, with nothing that might alert one that there was Brownii in their background. Were these plants from seeds where Brownii was the pod parent ? She was not able to say. In theory it would seem possible to hybridize with Brownii, using diploid pollen from lactiflora types, as their carpals are definitely peony-like, but one would need to use frozen pollen from the previous year, or have a friend who lived in an area which was considerably warmer than yours to supply you with some. So even when considering potential compatibility issues, there are also a fair number of non-genetic “practicalities” which might also stand in the way of working with this intriguing species.
Hum, I wonder what they are trying to contend here, when they appear to show two different P.Brownii, and two different P.Californica ? It seems like they do this with several other of the species as well. Are they just saying that they looked at several different samples, or are they saying that they found distinct subspecies ?