Pink Peony Flower

Pink peony in bloom — The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. © John Corney

Some flowers are quiet. This one is not.

I photographed this peony at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, some years back — a single open bloom with white outer petals surrounding a glowing hot-pink and coral center, and a dense cluster of bright orange stamens at the very heart. The effect is of a flower that looks lit from within.

About Peonies at The Huntington

Peonies (genus Paeonia) have a slightly unusual relationship with Southern California. Most classic garden peonies — the herbaceous ones that die back to the ground each winter — need a significant cold period to bloom properly, which is why they're beloved of gardens in the American Midwest and Northeast but rarely successful in Los Angeles. San Marino is right at the edge of what peonies will tolerate.

The Huntington has found ways around this. Tree peonies (which are woody shrubs rather than perennials that die back) are less winter-chill dependent and grow well on the estate. There are notable displays in the Chinese Garden — the Garden of Flowing Fragrance — where peonies have deep cultural significance and are treated as one of the seasonal highlights. Peonies feature in the Rose Garden and Shakespeare Garden as well, and the whole estate uses a mix of tree, herbaceous, and intersectional (Itoh) peonies to stretch the flowering season as long as the climate allows.

When Peonies Bloom

Peak peony season at The Huntington runs roughly from late March through May, depending on the variety and the year. Tree peonies tend to bloom slightly earlier than herbaceous ones, and different cultivars come into bloom in staggered waves, so a visit anywhere in that window will usually catch something in flower. Peonies bloom briefly and dramatically — an individual flower typically lasts only a few days — so it's genuinely worth checking the Huntington's current bloom calendar before you go.

The Huntington maintains an events and bloom calendar that's the reliable source for what's currently flowering across the gardens. It's worth a quick check ahead of any visit, particularly if you're timing a trip specifically around peonies, roses, or one of the other showy seasonal displays.

Why Peonies Are Peonies

There's something almost theatrical about peony flowers — the "massive, overblown crepe-paper petals in luscious colors" as the Huntington's own gardeners once described them. They don't have much fragrance, and their foliage is unremarkable. Everything is in the flower itself. Ancient Chinese gardeners called peonies "the king of flowers," and their cultural weight in Chinese art and poetry runs for centuries. This particular bloom, with its white-outer-to-pink-inner gradient and glowing stamens, reads to me almost like a traditional Chinese ink-and-color painting of a peony — the flower has always attracted painters as much as gardeners, and looking at this photograph I can see why.

If you enjoyed this piece and would like to see more of my photography from The Huntington, my post on the Desert Garden covers a completely different corner of the estate — the alien landscape of cacti and succulents in the ten-acre desert collection. And my post on a pink pincushion cactus flower was taken in that same Desert Garden.