Rock's peony

The Paeonia rockii in the back garden is just coming into bloom.  I picked one vast, rounded, almost-open flower this morning, and brought it into the kitchen to admire it more closely, setting it in solitary splendour in a glass vase, a glistening pink globe the size of my fist.  Over the next forty minutes or so the tissue paper flowers unfolded into a flower so wide that when I placed my palm over it, my outstretched fingers and thumb couldn't reach the edges.

It is an extraordinary thing, Rock's peony, even more so when you consider that it is a straight species.  It's not even as though a thousand years of plant breeding had gone into producing such an exotic beauty.  No, its ancestors simply grew wild in the mountains of China.  The flower has two rows of petals, with notched and ruffled edges, and deep purple blotches at the base.  Some flare upwards, while others curl down, giving the whole a lively air of movement.  In the very centre of the flower is a mysterious, cream-coloured boss with a crimped and pointed top, as if it were wrapped in tissue paper crumpled to a peak, and surrounding the boss are multiple rows of stamens, consisting of huge, burnt yellow anthers on purple filaments.

The flower is scented, a strong, sweet, spicy smell.  The single bloom is enough to perfume a room, and when I came in later on from doing some shopping, as soon as I opened the front door I was hit by the mixture of freshly ground coffee beans and Paeonia rockii.

It is without doubt one of the most fabulous plants I know, as exciting as the great tree magnolias, and with the flowers carried on a more domestic scale.  If you can find a space a couple of metres across then you can give a home to Rock's peony, if you can get one.  Normal rules of supply and demand don't seem to apply, and plants tend to be hard to come by and hideously expensive, the high price apparently never stimulating some enterprising nursery grower to make lots more. Perhaps they are difficult to propagate.  My plant grows happily in normal soil, on the light side but not either the lightest sand or the stickiest clay.  It faces west, with a hint of north in it, so does not get full sun, but is sheltered from the early morning sun and the worst of the wind.  According to Wikipedia the plants are extremely cold tolerant, on the other hand tree peonies come into leaf early, and I have read that it's better to avoid putting them in an east facing position.

After the amazing flowers are over the plant is frankly dull for the rest of the year, but I forgive it that.  By then it has more than earned its space.