The Arrangement Of Flowers

Vase of Peonies

A vase on a table holds a bouquet of red and pink peonies of the paeonia sinensis variety. They are already almost over: one of them is drooping, another has lost its petals. One flower lies on the table.

Manet unquestionably painted the finest bouquets of his period, and the peony is his favourite flower: he painted no less than fifteen pictures of it, three of which are in the Louvre. His peonies are always of the paeonia sinensis variety. This was introduced from China in the first years of the nineteenth century and had its greatest success from the beginning of the Second Empire onwards; it was one of the manifestations of the revival of Far Eastern influence in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The peony was one of the favourite plants of the Chinese and Japanese. The arborescent variety (paeonia suffriticosa), which grows to six feet in height and has magnificent pink flowers, has been cultivated in China since time immemorial, and by the tenth

century there were already thirty-nine varieties of it. The Chinese name means 'the most beautiful.' In China speculation centered round these peonies, as it did later, in the West, on tulips. For a long time they were known in the West from paintings or embroideries imported from the Orient, but the plant itself was closely protected in the gardens of the Imperial Palace and in those of the mandarins. In 1787 Dr Duncan, a surgeon then working for the East India Company, managed to procure a specimen, which he brought back to Kew Gardens. The plant fetched a high price in the West.

Other varieties of the paeonia had been known in the West for a long time: Pliny calls it the oldest of plants. It received its name from Paeon, the doctor who used its roots to dress the wound given to Pluto by Hercules. Paeon became the god of healing and was indentified with Apollo; so it was that a hymn in praise of Apollo was called a paean. The Greeks said that peonies must only be picked at night, for the green woodpecker pecked out the eyes of the rash man who might try to do so by day; also they should be uprooted by a hungry dog attracted by the smell of roast meat, for the groaning of the plant was fatal to anyone who heard it. All these legends come perhaps from the phosphorescence of the seed, which gave it a supernatural appearance.

The male or wild peony (paeonia mascula or corallina) seems to be a native of the North of Europe. The common garden (or female) peony (paeonia officinalis), which, as its name implies, is used in pharmacy, came from Crete and the Mediterranean coasts and was introduced into Europe in the sixteenth century. Several varieties of peony were currently used by the flower painters of the seventeenth century: along with the rose, the tulip and the iris, the peony is one of the chief ornaments of the bouquets of that period.