The Forums have now been closed (except for the forum where you can comment on posts/articles from our ‘magazine’). It was from the beginning somewhat doubtful whether both a forum and an activity wall would not be confusing. If they would integrate well with one another I’d still stand behind it, but although the discussion topics do appear nicely into the activity wall, the other way around doesn’t work too well. I’m no IT-geek myself so I can’t fix this and paying someone for doing this will be too much trouble for the few benefits gained. The Forum wasn’t too much used, something which can obviously be seen at other websites as well (the once-vibrant yahoo peony groups have simply been abandoned and then deleted). All discussions, be they interesting or not, are happening at other social media, mostly facebook and instagram. They all have their own activity wall in one form or another, so I guess this is pretty much the current standard. Therefore, from now on, only this activity wall will be available for easy public conversation. Private messages are of course still possible (after friendships have been accepted).

From time to time we try to update the species pages. Usually images are fetched from different social media, but it takes a lot of work to filter the wrong ones out. So to lower the work pressure there we try to obtain images of the species in the wild from people that have visited these places or live nearby. Here’s an image of P. daurica ssp tomentosa from North-East Iran, Golestan Province. More can be seen on the page of this species. It would prefer calling this (sub-)species P. wittmanniana ssp tomentosa, but as Hong’s new book about peony species is forthcoming I’ll see what he will make of it. Thanks @harrie50 for the images.