Real Plants And Unreal Plants -- The Peony Was A Wildflower Until The Hybridists Took Over

YOU TELL ME WHAT'S REAL. I can't tell anymore, although my 4-year-old daughter seems to have a much better handle on it than I do.

The other day I noticed that someone in my family had carefully placed plastic waterplants into our goldfish bowl. The Mr. Natural who resides in the right side of my brain didn't like the look of it at all, and so I soon complained that whoever put it there, please, get rid of it. My 4-year-old looked me over as if my sense of aesthetics was the result of some rare Martian disease. She proceeded to climb up on my lap to assure me that a plastic plant is no different than any of the other plants growing out in our garden. "That plant is made out of God, you know," she explained. "All the other plants are made out of God, too, you know. They're all real plants, you know."

She illuminated this metaphysical theme by pointing out the window at a gargantuan pink peony bush that was just then starting to unfold its 20 or more massive flower heads. I couldn't help snickering at her choice, which caused her to look me over as if I might be about to offer up some cogent counter-argument. Actually, I wasn't snickering at either her or her premise.

The fact of the matter is, my 6-foot peony plant doesn't exist anywhere else beside the cultivated gardens of human beings whose eyes happen to be bigger than their love for what I might call unadulterated nature. My daughter's statements got Mr. Natural wondering to himself. Is a 10-inch wide, double peony a real flower? After all, it can't even reproduce itself without the active interference of horticulturalists following some abstruse genetic formula.

And that's only one part of it. Although the plants themselves are quite hardy, double peonies would certainly prefer to spend their flowering days in a carefully modulated greenhouse to avoid turning all those heavy heads to mush at the first sign of a real rain. The stems of the plant won't even support the blooms without some erector-set arrangement of artificial scaffolding that would shame the great cathedral builders of medieval Europe.

Wild peonies grow in many parts of Europe and Asia. The flowers are either lemon yellow or some shade of red, with the flower's petals arranged in a shallow bowl that looks suspiciously like a four-inch wide buttercup. This look is more than coincidental. The peony is actually a first cousin of the humble buttercup. Both flowers are members of the ranunculus family.

Then hybridists took over. First it was the Chinese who over a thousand years' time upturned and feathered the edges of the blossoms and finally ended up using a stylized version of this creation as one of the major decorative motifs of their civilization. The ancient Greeks also played with it. The Japanese got hold of it, and focused most of their talents on increasing the size and shape of the stamens that erupt from the middle of the flower. What they settled on is today referred to as the crested or Japanese-type peony, composed of a perfect bowl of buttery-thick single petals surrounding a huge bush of stamens sprouting in wild disarray in the center.

THE CRESTED HERBACEOUS PEONY must be considered one of the masterpieces of the horticulturalist's art. I have one of them planted in a prime location just to the side of my front step. For years, all the flowers on it were semi-double in form; deep velvety strawberry red in color, with a huge blood-red mound of stamens rising like a medallion from out of the center. Then, two years ago, about half the flowers on the plant suddenly blossomed quite single in form, and with a striking yellow crest sitting in the middle of the bowl. One amateur plant psychologist tells me I'm to blame because the plant is a graft and I buried the juncture. Another local critic assures me that Chernobyl did it.

I'm not scientific-minded enough to care what caused my formerly normal peony to turn schizophrenic without warning, although I certainly admire both variations on the crested theme. I sometimes wonder, in my ignorance, what would happen if I carefully split the plant in two at the roots. Would each division continue to put out two distinct flower types, or would I then have two entirely different peony plants?

If I were in the business of developing a brand new taxonomy based on weirdness rather than genetics, I'd probably place this schizophrenic peony in the same genus as an equally bizarre clematis plant growing up against the south wall of my house and which blooms to the east each July and to the west each September. Not even the plant psychologist knows what to make of that one. Three or four more plants like these, and I might someday consider opening a plant sideshow.

My crested peony is an all-around remarkable plant for several reasons that go beyond the shape and color of the flowers. The huge shiny-red buds that appear at soil level in February are among the most impressive harbingers of spring. And in late summer the foliage remains a neat 3-foot ball of a shrub, with deeply incised leaves of a striking bronzy green color.

If you decide to get one for yourself, visit your local nursery this spring. Expect to pay at least $20 for a good one. However, be aware that the crested form includes some very un-Japanese sounding names like Bowl of Beauty, Cora Stubbs, Karen Gray and, my personal favorite, Gold Standard.

AS WITH EVERYTHING ELSE, THE Americans and Europeans - especially the French - eventually got involved in the art of peony breeding. They soon began focusing on the breadth and weight of the blooms. And though modern breeders have added many excellent cultivars that owe a debt to either the classic Japanese or Chinese form, their most popular creations have been the 10-inch wide explosion of pink or red or white flowers that most of us think of today when we hear the name peony.

I own two of these whose name I never learned. I have always admired their wonderful roundness. And their seductive fragrance can definitely not be overlooked. Though I tired of their unrelenting neediness a long time ago, I still can't make myself yank them. They're simply too imposing. I made my peace with the two plants and now give them no extra care whatsoever. They have responded to this weaning process by still managing to produce the largest flowers in the garden, but not as many. My kids love them far more than I do, which is the precise reason my 4-year-old passed over so many other striking blooms in the border to make her point about divine origins.

The joy that my kids feel from the act of picking such mammoth blossoms can only be surpassed in their estimation by talking like a ventriloquist while pinching snap dragons, or making dolls by either pulling apart the bottoms of bleeding heart flowers, or bending hollyhock leaves and twigs around their blossoms.

I often find myself staring at the unopen buds of double peony plants with a sly smile on my face. Flowers are sex organs, and this one seems forever caught in a sexual double entendre. The seeds produced by this centerfold of a flower will never produce similarly endowed progeny. The double peony has, instead, devised a more roundabout reproductive strategy. These huge sex organs - for all intents and purposes, sterile - are, after all, the only reason that human hybridists continue to lavish so much time propagating it artificially. We might best consider double peonies and horticulturalists acting together in a kind of symbiotic sexual dance, not unlike what the clownfish does to coax food from a friendly sea anemone. The double peonies endure, while the horticulturalists turn a tidy profit. In other words, it's all about sex and money; very symbiotic, indeed.

Harking back to my own little girl's statement about the nature of reality mirroring the reality of nature, I sometimes find that the American popular success of double flowers makes my mind conjure many big social thoughts. Thoughts like: What is it about the American character that makes us admire great sterile blobs over more intricate though humble natural forms?

Or consider this admitted non sequitur that originated from the Mr. Natural side of my brain: Do our garden preferences somehow offer a hint at why Americans are so much more eager to promote the drilling of oil wells in our disappearing wild spaces over better energy efficiency? Someone once said that the environmental crisis is actually a crisis in the way we humans perceive nature. In that light, does our predilection for day-glo pansies, basketball-sized dahlias - or the fact that we award our blue ribbons to the most bloated zucchinis - offer up the seed of a grand statement about what some might call our national ineptitude to both accept and cherish nature as it is?

AS FLOWERS EXIST WILD IN nature, they are often a mind-boggling paradox: delicate-looking but with an iron constitution. This latter attribute is, of course, the precise reason we refer to so many of them as weeds. But if, for just one example, dandelions didn't pop up uninvited anyplace and everywhere people choose to plant lawns; if they were instead, rare high-meadow flowers that bloom only every fourth year on the north face of one mountain in Upper Baluchistan, they would probably be fawned over and hybridized as much as peonies are today. I'd wager a bet that we would quickly transform the humble dandelion from the object of so much herbicidal vengeance into one of the premier "yellows" in the garden. People would schedule their vacations in sync with the peak dandelion season at Butchart Gardens, just as they now travel to view that delicate and exceedingly difficult-to-grow flower known as a Himalayan poppy or Meconopsis.

Maybe I'll call up Butchart Gardens and suggest to them that the only reason I don't visit them more often than I do is that my kids simply don't last very long gazing at the likes of blue Himalayan poppies, although my wife and I would just as soon stare at them all day long. Maybe if they'd only consider adding a promenade of plastic fishbowl plants. Or how about a hand-carved little mermaid languishing on a rock in a reflecting pool with Sebastian crab sitting on her knee? I might even be so bold as to suggest that they hire my daughter as their consultant. She may not always know what's real, but she certainly knows what she likes.

This essay is excerpted from Jim Nollman's upcoming book, "A Sense of Place: Gardening as if future generations mattered." He lives on San Juan Island. Harley Soltes is the Pacific staff photographer.