What is a Peony?
A peony is a plant in the Paeonia genus. Peonies are native to China and Japan, where they have long been prized for their showy displays of colorful flowers, and they are cultivated throughout the Northern Hemisphere in gardens of all shapes, styles, and sizes. Many garden stores carry peonies, and several companies actually specialize in raising and hybridizing these plants, creating a stunning array of cultivars to satisfy a wide range of tastes. You can also see peonies depicted in numerous works of Asian art, where they are associated with happiness, fortune, long life, and honor. The peony is in the buttercup family, but these plants don’t have many resemblances to the humble buttercup. They produce large, showy flowers which are typically quite colorful, with leaves which are deeply lobed, sometimes so much so that they look extremely lacy. Peonies can be white, yellow, pink, red, and yellow, and they tend to appear in the late spring and early summer. There are two distinct typ
