As part of a multi-year, multi-faceted project, Matthaei-Nichols staff and a special panel of experts work to identify peonies from the Nichols Arboretum Peony Garden
Thursday, June 7, University of Michigan Matthaei Botanical Gardens - On this warm late-spring day, buckets of cut-peony
bouquets in hues of pink, white, and red dazzled Greenhouse 3. A rosy peony
aroma hung in the air.
Harvested in bud stage days earlier and kept cool
until they could be forced to open, the cut peonies evoked a powerful memory of
the now mostly faded peony garden itself.
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Left to right: Peony Council member Scott Parker, Matthaei-Nichols staff member
Carmen Leskoviansky, and Council member Reiner Jakubowski. The Council arrived at
Matthaei Botanical Gardens last week to help identify hundreds of peony stems that had been cut days earlier. |
The flowers awaited the collective wisdom of
the Peony Advisory Council, a group of local, regional, and international peony
experts, growers, horticulturists, business owners, and historians. The Council
reconvened this June to continue its work on helping Matthaei-Nichols staff
conduct the Nichols Arboretum Peony Garden
Initiative, a multi-year renovation project.
Staff and the Council are
aiming for a positive identification of all the plants in the peony garden. No
easy task, since peony names, forms, colors, and other attributes have in some
cases shifted over the years.
While many of the peonies in the garden are believed to be correctly identified, there are some plants of questionable
identity and approximately forty mystery plants. Verifying the identities of
these plants will provide Matthaei-Nichols and the Council with a complete and
correct catalog of the collection. In turn, the project will transform the
garden into an internationally recognized reference collection that will serve
as a conservation model for other historic cultivar collections and a
destination for peony lovers.
To make the ID possible, exhaustive
records are consulted. Council member Reiner Jakubowski in particular has amassed
thousands of carefully organized records over decades into an enormous database
created from historic peony manuals, catalogs, growers’ descriptions, and more.
In Greenhouse 3, already
grown too warm by mid-morning, Matthaei-Nichols staff removed tagged stems of
peonies, some with names. Carmen Leskoviansky, a staff horticulturist who leads
the Peony Garden Initiative, read from descriptions based on Jakubowski’s work.
The council members examined
each flower, comparing it against the description. Notes were taken; intense discussion ensued. Then the stem
of flowers moved down the line where a photo volunteer clicked several pictures
of the peony, including identifying features such as petals, stamens, and the name tag itself.
With the Council’s help recently,
several unknown cultivars have been identified, including the rare ‘Silvia
Saunders.’ Along the way, Arb and Garden’s staff have learned a great deal
about peony culture and disease.
Stay tuned as work on the largest collection
of heirloom peonies in North America continues. For more information, visit the peony section on our website.
The Ann Arbor Bonsai Society show is a longstanding tradition and an opportunity for visitors to get an up-close look at some first-rate examples of skillfully tended trees. In honor of that tradition this year’s show pays tribute to renowned local bonsai instructors and artists Jack Wikle and Bill Heston for their contributions to the Society and for their lifelong pursuit of the art and practice of bonsai.
