A Journey Through the World’s Most Famous Peony Growing Regions

The peony, with its lavish blooms and intoxicating fragrance, has captivated gardeners and poets for millennia. My quest to witness these floral monarchs in their greatest glory led me across three continents, to regions where peony cultivation has become both art form and tradition. What began as simple curiosity evolved into a year-long pilgrimage, a journey that would reshape my understanding of beauty, patience, and the extraordinary bonds between people and plants.

Luoyang, China: The Ancient Heart of Peony Culture

My journey began where the peony’s story itself originated—in Luoyang, Henan Province, China. This ancient capital has celebrated peonies for over 1,500 years, and arriving during the annual Peony Festival in April felt like stepping into a living scroll painting. The city transforms during this season, its population swelling with millions of visitors who descend upon its gardens in a ritual of collective appreciation that has persisted through dynasties, revolutions, and the rush of modernity.

The morning mist clung to the grounds of the Luoyang National Peony Garden as I entered, joining throngs of visitors who had traveled from across China. Here, over 1,000 varieties bloom across nine themed gardens, their colors ranging from the purest whites to deep maroons that appear almost black in certain light. The Chinese call the peony mudan—the “king of flowers”—and in Luoyang, this title feels entirely justified. Walking these paths, I understood why Tang Dynasty poets devoted entire volumes to describing peony blooms, why emperors bankrupted treasuries acquiring rare specimens, why the flower became synonymous with prosperity, honor, and feminine beauty.

The Sui Dynasty Emperor Yang first established imperial peony gardens here in the 7th century, and traces of that imperial legacy linger everywhere. In the Wangcheng Park, I found ancient tree peonies that had survived the Cultural Revolution hidden in peasants’ gardens, smuggled back into public collections after Mao’s death. Their gnarled trunks, some as thick as a man’s thigh, spoke of centuries of survival, of value so intrinsic that people risked everything to preserve these living treasures.

Local growers, their hands gnarled from decades of work, shared tea with me and explained the philosophy behind their craft. “We don’t just grow peonies,” one elderly cultivator told me through an interpreter, “we cultivate relationships with them that span generations.” His name was Master Wang, and his family had tended peonies for nine generations. He walked me through his private garden, explaining the subtle differences between the ‘Yao Huang’ (Imperial Yellow) and ‘Wei Zi’ (Wei Purple), two legendary varieties that commanded astronomical prices during the Song Dynasty. Many of the tree peonies (Paeonia suffruticosa) I admired were over a century old, their woody stems twisted into sculptural forms that seemed to defy gravity.

Master Wang showed me grafting techniques passed down through his family, methods for root division that required an almost surgical precision, and the art of “reading” a plant to understand its needs before it showed visible signs of distress. We ate lunch in his courtyard—simple noodles and preserved vegetables—while he recounted stories of the great peony masters of the past, men whose names were spoken with the same reverence reserved for calligraphers and painters. In traditional Chinese culture, I learned, the cultivation of peonies was considered one of the highest forms of artistic expression, requiring knowledge of horticulture, aesthetics, poetry, and philosophy.

The Luoyang Peony Research Institute became my classroom for three intensive days. Scientists there are working to preserve ancient varieties, some known only from paintings and poems, attempting to back-breed modern hybrids to recover lost genetic traits. Dr. Chen, a geneticist who had devoted thirty years to peony research, showed me their seed bank, their experimental gardens, and shared the institute’s ambitious goal: to create a complete genetic map of all known peony varieties. “We’re racing against time,” she explained. “Climate change threatens the traditional growing zones, and many old varieties exist as single specimens in remote villages. When those plants die, we lose genetic diversity that took centuries to develop.”

In the evenings, I wandered the night markets where vendors sold everything peony-related: candied peony petals, peony-seed oil for cooking, peony-root tea believed to have medicinal properties, and paintings of peonies on silk and paper. The flower permeates every aspect of life here, woven into the cultural fabric so thoroughly that separating Luoyang from its peonies would be like separating Venice from its canals.

Yangzhou, Jiangsu: The Scholar’s Garden Tradition

Before leaving China, I made a detour to Yangzhou, another historic peony center in Jiangsu Province. While Luoyang represents imperial grandeur, Yangzhou embodies the scholar’s aesthetic—refined, understated, contemplative. The city’s Slender West Lake region contains some of China’s most exquisite classical gardens, and here peonies are planted not in vast collections but as carefully placed specimens meant to complement architecture, water features, and the borrowed scenery of distant hills.

At the Geyuan Garden, built by a salt merchant in the Qing Dynasty, I found peonies integrated into the famous “four seasons” rock gardens. Each courtyard represented a different season, and the spring garden featured tree peonies planted beside bamboo and early-flowering cherries. The head gardener, an elderly woman named Ms. Liu, explained the principle of jiejing or “borrowed scenery”—how the placement of each plant was calculated to frame particular views, to create layered compositions that revealed themselves as one moved through the space.

“A peony in a scholar’s garden is never just a peony,” Ms. Liu told me as we sat in a pavilion overlooking a pond where koi drifted beneath floating lotus leaves. “It’s a symbol, a poem, a meditation on transience and beauty. We place them where their reflection in water doubles their impact, where morning light will illuminate them dramatically, where their fragrance will be carried by prevailing breezes to unexpected locations.”

The Yangzhou approach taught me that peony cultivation is not just about producing the largest or most abundant blooms, but about understanding the flower’s role in a larger aesthetic ecosystem. Here, restraint was valued over abundance, suggestion over statement. A single perfect bloom glimpsed through a moon gate could carry more impact than a hundred flowers in a commercial display.

Yokohama, Japan: Where Precision Meets Beauty

From China, I traveled east to Japan, where peony cultivation took on an entirely different character. The gardens of Yokohama and the surrounding Kanagawa Prefecture showcase the Japanese aesthetic of refined simplicity. At the Sankeien Garden, I found peonies placed with the same deliberate care as pieces in a tea ceremony, each plant a studied composition of stem, leaf, and flower.

The garden was created by Tomitaro Hara, a silk merchant, in 1906, and he personally supervised the placement of each tree and shrub. The peonies here grow within sight of historic buildings relocated from Kyoto and Kamakura—a three-story pagoda, a tea house where the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi once held ceremonies, a farmhouse with a thatched roof centuries old. Walking these grounds during peony season, I felt the layers of Japanese aesthetic philosophy manifesting in vegetable form.

Japanese growers favor both herbaceous peonies and tree peonies, but they’ve developed unique training methods that create breathtaking specimens. Each flower is often protected by a small paper umbrella during rain, preserving the blooms’ perfection. These delicate shelters, called botan-gasa, are themselves works of art—waxed paper stretched over bamboo frames, often decorated with calligraphy or simple paintings. I watched gardeners tending to individual plants with an attention that bordered on meditation, removing imperfect petals and adjusting supports with jeweler’s precision, their movements economical and purposeful.

My host in Yokohama, Mr. Tanaka, was a third-generation peony grower whose nursery supplied high-end garden centers and landscape designers throughout Japan. His family specialized in training tree peonies into specific forms—some pruned to resemble ancient pines, others shaped into perfect hemispheres of bloom. The work required years of careful pruning, strategic grafting, and constant attention. “A tree peony lives for centuries,” Mr. Tanaka explained as we examined a specimen his grandfather had started training in 1947. “We are not growing plants for ourselves, but for the future. The work I do today, my grandchildren will see the results of.”

He showed me the niwaki techniques—the art of garden pruning—applied to peonies. While most gardeners worldwide simply let tree peonies grow naturally, Japanese specialists carefully thin branches, balance asymmetries, and create negative space within the plant structure itself. The result is specimens that look simultaneously natural and impossible, as if nature had conspired to create perfect miniature landscapes in plant form.

The local nurseries revealed another aspect of Japanese peony culture—hybridization. Breeders here have created some of the world’s most spectacular double-flowered varieties, their blooms so dense with petals they seem impossibly architectural. Names like ‘Shimane Chojuraku’ and ‘Kamata-fuji’ appeared in Mr. Tanaka’s catalog, each variety the result of decades of selection and cross-breeding. He opened a wooden cabinet filled with hand-painted scrolls showing the lineages of his most prized hybrids, botanical family trees drawn with the same care genealogists apply to noble bloodlines.

We visited the Tokyo Peony Society’s annual exhibition, held in a department store’s event space. Here, individual blooms were displayed like precious jewels, each flower cut and placed in a bronze vase, accompanied by a card listing the variety name, the grower’s name, and often a short poem composed specifically for that bloom. Judges moved through the displays with measuring tools and magnifying glasses, assessing petal count, color uniformity, and form with forensic intensity. The competitive aspect surprised me until I understood it as an extension of Japan’s long tradition of refinement in all pursuits—the same perfectionist impulse that produces master sushi chefs, tea ceremony practitioners, and sword smiths.

Kyoto’s Temple Gardens: Spiritual Dimensions

A bullet train carried me from Yokohama to Kyoto, where peonies take on spiritual significance in Buddhist temple gardens. At Kennin-ji, the oldest Zen temple in Kyoto, peonies grow in the contemplation garden outside the abbot’s quarters. The head monk, who had trained for forty years in the monastery, explained that caring for the garden was itself a form of meditation, a practice as important as sitting zazen or studying koans.

“When you prune a peony, you must empty your mind completely,” he told me in careful English, his weathered hands demonstrating the angle of a cut on a dormant stem. “If you think about the past or future, if you let ego guide the shears, you will harm the plant. Only complete presence allows you to see what the plant truly needs.”

The temple peonies bloomed in a gravel garden where stones had been arranged to suggest mountains and rivers. White and pale pink varieties predominated, chosen for their association with purity and enlightenment. The monk explained that peonies, which bloom magnificently but briefly, serve as reminders of mono no aware—the pathos of transient things, the bittersweet awareness that all beautiful moments must end.

Château de Courson, France: European Elegance

Crossing to Europe, I found myself in the rolling countryside south of Paris, at the Château de Courson. While France may not have China’s ancient peony traditions, French gardens have elevated the herbaceous peony (Paeonia lactiflora) to new heights of popularity. The château, a graceful 17th-century building with honey-colored stone walls and a mansard roof, sits amid thirty hectares of parkland that have been transformed into one of Europe’s most important botanical gardens.

The château’s gardens bloom in late May, and I timed my visit perfectly. Here, peonies aren’t grown in separate collections but woven into romantic mixed borders alongside roses, foxgloves, and delphiniums. The effect is less formal than in Asia—a cottage garden luxury where peonies contribute their voluptuous presence to a larger tapestry. The head gardener, Patrice, a man with soil perpetually under his fingernails and an encyclopedic knowledge of perennials, walked me through the garden explaining the French philosophy of jardin naturel—natural gardening that nonetheless shows subtle signs of human curation.

“We want visitors to feel they’ve stumbled upon a meadow that just happens to be the most beautiful meadow in the world,” Patrice explained in rapid French, gesturing at a border where pale yellow peonies rose above a sea of purple alliums and silver artemisia. “But of course, every plant has been chosen, placed, edited. We rehearse spontaneity.”

The château twice annually hosts one of Europe’s premier plant fairs, attracting nurseries and collectors from across the continent. During my visit, the spring fair was in full swing, with vendors’ tents scattered across the lawns, each offering specialties—one devoted entirely to heritage roses, another to Japanese maples, and several to peonies. I spent hours talking with French nurserymen who had devoted their lives to these flowers.

At the booth of Pivoines Rivière, a fourth-generation family nursery from Brittany, I met Claude Rivière, whose great-grandfather had imported the first Chinese tree peonies to France in the 1880s. He showed me their catalog, filled with varieties they had bred over the decades, many named for family members or local landmarks. “Peonies connect us to the past,” Claude said, pulling up a chair and pouring me a glass of calvados despite the early hour. “These plants live longer than we do. The varieties my great-grandfather planted still bloom in our demonstration garden. When I work with them, I feel his hands guiding mine.”

French nurserymen have also been instrumental in developing intersectional hybrids, crossing herbaceous and tree peonies to create the hardy “Itoh” hybrids. At specialist nurseries in the Loire Valley, I met growers who ship their roots worldwide, spreading French-refined varieties to enthusiasts on every continent. The Loire Valley, with its mild climate and rich alluvial soils, has become Europe’s answer to Luoyang—a region where peony cultivation shapes local identity and economy.

I spent a week based in the town of Angers, visiting nurseries scattered through the surrounding countryside. At each, I found passionate plantspeople who treated their peonies like beloved children, who knew every plant’s parentage, who could discourse for hours on the subtle differences between seemingly identical pink varieties. One grower, Madame Beaumont, had over 600 varieties in her personal collection, occupying every spare meter of her property. Her dining room table was covered with notebooks filled with observations—bloom dates, weather conditions, fertilizer applications—recorded in elegant fountain pen script stretching back to 1972.

“Peonies reward patience,” she told me over coffee and almond croissants she’d baked that morning. “Americans, they want instant results. But a peony takes three years to establish, five years to reach its potential, and then it will outlive you, outlive your children, become a family heirloom. This long view, this is what’s missing from modern horticulture.”

Paeonia Park, Netherlands: Scientific Innovation

Before leaving Europe, I ventured north to the Netherlands, where the Dutch pragmatism and horticultural innovation have transformed peony cultivation. Near Amsterdam, I visited research facilities where scientists are using cutting-edge technology to extend the peony’s growing range, improve disease resistance, and even alter bloom times.

Dr. Van der Berg, a horticulturalist at Wageningen University, walked me through climate-controlled growing houses where peonies bloomed in winter, their natural dormancy broken by carefully manipulated temperature and light cycles. “The Dutch flower industry is worth billions,” she explained, showing me row upon row of potted peonies at various stages of forcing. “We supply cut flowers to the world. To remain competitive, we must innovate constantly.”

The Dutch have also pioneered tissue culture propagation of peonies, allowing rare varieties to be multiplied faster than traditional division methods. In sterile laboratory conditions, I watched technicians working with microscopes and scalpels, coaxing tiny pieces of peony tissue to regenerate into whole plants. The process takes years and requires exacting precision, but it has saved several varieties from extinction and made others commercially viable for the first time.

Yet even here, amid the technology and commercial imperatives, I found the same underlying reverence for the flower. Dr. Van der Berg kept a personal peony garden behind her house—no experiments, no data collection, just beauty for its own sake. “I study them all week,” she said, deadheading a coral-pink variety as her children played nearby. “But on weekends, I just enjoy them. Science can tell us how they work, but not why they move us. That remains mysterious.”

Holland, Michigan: America’s Peony Heartland

My final stop brought me to an unexpected peony paradise—the American Midwest. Holland, Michigan, has become one of North America’s premier peony-growing regions, with commercial fields stretching for acres across the flat landscape. The town, settled by Dutch immigrants in the mid-19th century, has maintained strong connections to the Netherlands, including a thriving horticultural industry that supplies much of the United States with tulips, daffodils, and increasingly, peonies.

Unlike the ornamental gardens of Asia and Europe, these are working farms, supplying cut flowers to florists across the continent. During peak season in June, the fields become striped rivers of color—coral, pink, white, and red flowing toward the horizon. The scale is breathtaking; where I had seen hundreds of plants in Luoyang, here there were hundreds of thousands. Driving down country roads between fields, the perfume was so intense it made my eyes water, a heady sweetness carried on the wind off Lake Michigan.

I stayed with the Dekker family, third-generation peony farmers whose operation had grown from two acres to over a hundred during my host’s lifetime. Jim Dekker, a weathered man in his sixties who still personally oversaw every harvest, met me at dawn on my first morning, handing me rubber boots and a cup of coffee strong enough to strip paint. “You want to understand peonies?” he said. “Come cut with us. You’ll learn more in a day in the fields than a month in books.”

The cutting crew—a mix of local teenagers, Mexican migrant workers, and Jim’s extended family—moved through the rows with practiced efficiency. The timing is critical: cut too early and the buds won’t open; too late and they’ll shatter during shipping. Each variety has a different harvesting window, sometimes lasting only three or four days. During peak season, the crew works sixteen-hour days, racing against time and weather.

Local growers taught me about the commercial side of peony cultivation: the challenges of timing harvests, the logistics of cold storage, and the economics of an industry where plants may take three years before producing their first commercial blooms. Jim walked me through the cooling barns where cut stems are stored at just above freezing, their blooms suspended in a state between bud and flower. “We can hold them for weeks like this,” he explained, opening a cooler to show me thousands of stems standing in buckets. “Lets us supply florists year-round, not just during the natural bloom season.”

The economics are daunting: land costs, labor, equipment, irrigation systems, cold storage facilities—all for a crop that produces income only a few weeks per year. Many growers are diversifying, adding tulips, dahlias, and other specialty flowers. Jim’s son, Jake, who was taking over the business, showed me his plans for agritourism—opening the fields for photography sessions, offering farm tours, selling potted plants to home gardeners. “The wholesale market is brutal,” Jake explained. “We need multiple revenue streams to survive.”

Yet even in these production fields, the reverence for the flowers remained. “They’re not just a crop,” Jim told me as we walked between rows, cut stems dripping in my hands, “they’re something special we get to share with the world.” He pointed to a variety called ‘Sarah Bernhardt’, its pale pink blooms massive and fragrant. “My grandfather planted the original stock of these in 1952. Some of those plants are still producing. When I harvest them, I think about his hands planting them, about all the springs they’ve seen. There’s history in every stem.”

The Michigan Peony Growers Association hosted a field day during my visit, and growers from across the state gathered to share knowledge, compare varieties, and discuss challenges. The atmosphere was collegial rather than competitive—these farmers understood that their success was interconnected, that the growing reputation of Michigan peonies lifted all boats. Conversations ranged from soil amendments to pest management to predictions about climate change’s impacts on bloom times.

One grower, Maria Rodriguez, had started farming peonies after decades working in others’ fields. Now she ran a fifteen-acre operation specializing in unusual varieties—deep reds, near-blacks, striped and picoteed forms rarely seen in commercial production. “I wanted to grow the peonies people dream about,” she told me, showing me ‘Black Pirate’, a variety so dark red it appeared almost purple in certain light. “Not just the standard pink and white that every supermarket carries. These are flowers with personality, with presence. They cost more, take more care, but to the right customer, they’re worth it.”

Alaska: The Midnight Sun Peonies

A conversation at the Michigan gathering led me to make one final, unexpected detour—to Alaska, where the extreme summer daylight produces peonies unlike any I’d seen elsewhere. I flew to Anchorage, then drove to the Matanuska Valley, where the combination of 20-hour days and cool temperatures creates blooms of extraordinary size and intensity.

At the Reindeer Farm Garden Center, I met Susan Greenwood, who had been pioneering peony cultivation in Alaska for thirty years. “Everyone said we couldn’t grow them here,” she recalled, walking me through her display garden where plants towered over our heads, their blooms the size of dinner plates. “Wrong hardiness zone, too cold, too extreme. But peonies love cold winters—they need them for dormancy. And our long summer days? The plants just photosynthesize constantly, storing massive amounts of energy.”

The results were spectacular: varieties that bloom modestly elsewhere became giants here, their stems thick as broomsticks, their flowers so heavy they required support cages. Colors seemed more saturated, perhaps because of the quality of Arctic light. Susan had been conducting informal trials for decades, determining which varieties thrived in Alaska’s unique conditions and which merely survived.

“We’re at the frontier of peony cultivation,” she said, gazing at her fields with unmistakable pride. “Climate change might be making it harder to grow them in traditional regions, but it’s opening up possibilities here. Someday, Alaska might be famous for peonies. I probably won’t live to see it, but I’m laying the groundwork.”

Reflections

Standing in that Michigan field, cut stems dripping in my hands, I thought about the journey these flowers have made—from ancient Chinese gardens to modern commercial farms, from imperial symbols to wedding bouquets. In each region, I’d found different expressions of the same fundamental appreciation: for beauty, for patience, for the partnership between human intention and natural magnificence.

The peony grows slowly, demands attention, and blooms briefly. Perhaps that’s why, across cultures and centuries, it has retained its power to stop us in our tracks, to make us pause and witness the extravagant generosity of the natural world. In every region I visited, despite differences in technique, tradition, and philosophy, this essential truth remained unchanged.

But I also saw troubling signs. Climate change is shifting traditional growing zones, making cultivation more challenging in regions where peonies have thrived for centuries. The knowledge held by master growers—often unwritten, passed down through demonstration and apprenticeship—is endangered as young people abandon agriculture for easier livelihoods. Genetic diversity is contracting as commercial growers focus on a handful of proven varieties while rare historic cultivars disappear.

Yet I left my journey fundamentally optimistic. In every region, I met people who loved these flowers enough to devote their lives to them, who saw in peonies something worth preserving and celebrating. Young people were entering the field, bringing new techniques and perspectives while respecting traditional knowledge. Scientists were working to preserve genetic diversity and adapt cultivation techniques for a changing climate. Home gardeners worldwide were planting peonies, creating small pockets of beauty that might, collectively, ensure these flowers persist for future generations to witness and wonder at.

The peony has survived empire collapses, wars, revolutions, and dramatic climate shifts over its long partnership with humanity. Walking through those fields, gardens, and nurseries, I understood that this resilience comes not just from the plant’s inherent toughness, but from something it inspires in us—a willingness to tend beauty for its own sake, to invest years for weeks of bloom, to preserve and pass forward living treasures whose full glory we may never personally witness.

In our rushed, digital age, peonies offer a quiet resistance. They cannot be hurried, cannot be simplified, cannot be reduced to data points or optimized into irrelevance. They bloom when they’re ready, demand patience, require presence. And in return, they offer moments of such pure beauty that they justify all the waiting, all the work, all the hope invested in their survival.

My journey taught me that peony regions are not just geographical locations—they are communities of practice, living traditions, and botanical archives containing centuries of human effort and affection. To visit them is to witness the best of what humanity can offer: the capacity to notice beauty, the patience to cultivate it, and the generosity to preserve it for others, including those not yet born, who will someday stand as I did, breathless before a bloom that took decades to perfect and lasts only days, grateful that someone, somewhere, cared enough to make such beauty possible.