Large flowers, delicately fragrant - peonies inspire

Large flowers, fragrant, with spectacular colors: Everyone loves peonies. Find out how old they can get and who used them for decoration as early as 200 BC.

With their opulent, fringed flowers, striking colors and subtle fragrance, peonies are simply enchanting. In the vase, they outshine everything else with their beauty, and in the garden one stands almost speechless before this poetic spectacle of scent and color.

In the garden, peonies are also really long-lasting and hardly know any pests. Peonies are almost like Methuselah and can get very old. The oldest known specimens are even 350 years old.

Their decorative qualities were already appreciated by the Chinese of the Qin and Han dynasties in 200 BC. The peony only came to Europe much later as a cultivated flower.
In the 18th century it was first cultivated in England and from there it spread to continental Europe and the rest of the world. According to the American Peony Society, 6455 peony varieties are registered today.