Peony hybrid heaven

After 70 years and thousands of failed attempts, the resultant Itoh peonies are gorgeous hybrids that are well worth the wait

- Val Bourne

I LIVE on top of the windswept Cotswolds and the Macmillan Way runs along the bottom of my garden. I can guarantee that at least two or three people will knock on my cottage door during June and ask me the name of the enormous lemon-yellow peony close to my front door. I’ve even had ladies attempting to paint my Paeonia ‘Bartzella’ because it’s such a showstopper.

Be warned, though, because ‘Bartzella’ is rather like a brash Henry James heroine. It’s in your face and out there, so it needs careful placing because the enormous crepe-paper flowers will definitely overpower a traditional English border.

‘Bartzella’ is an Itoh hybrid, also known an intersectional hybrid – a cross that brings together the best of both its parents to create plants with disease-resistant foliage, wonderful autumn colour and spectacular blooms on sturdy stems that, once mature, will produce a sequence of flowers that last up to three weeks. There are now 90 of them, all named in the past 50 years, but the story of how they were bred goes back to the 1940s.

Breeding any peony is time-consuming, because those chunky, black ‘Liquorice Imp’ seeds take six or seven years to produce a flower – as I know to my cost. Crossing tree peonies and herbaceous peonies had proved an impossible task, due to pollen incompatibilities, and many had tried.

It all started in 1948…

However, in 1948 a Japanese botanist called Toichi Itoh managed to produce viable seeds after making thousands of crosses. He took pollen from Paeonia x lemoinei ‘Alice Harding’ (a yellow-flowered hybrid tree peony containing Moutan and Delavayanae blood) and dusted it on the style of Paeonia lactiflora ‘Kakoden’, a white herbaceous peony. Viable seeds appeared and he produced 36 variable seedlings.