Παιώνιον

Peony descends from Greek Παιώνιον (Paiōnion), named after Παίων (Páiōn), the physician to the Olympian gods in Greek mythology. According to Homer and later writers, Paeon used a plant from Mount Olympus to heal the war god Ares and Hades himself of wounds received in battle, and the plant was named for the divine healer who wielded it. This was not merely poetic: Greek and Roman physicians genuinely used peony roots, seeds, and flowers as medicine, prescribed for epilepsy, nightmares, menstrual disorders, and childbirth complications. Pliny the Elder lists over twenty medicinal applications for the plant. The flower was named for a myth, and the myth gave the flower serious pharmaceutical credentials that persisted in European medicine for nearly two millennia.

The medicinal reputation of the peony was elaborated through the doctrine of sympathetic magic and the classical concept of the plant protecting against evil spirits. Medieval European herbalists held that peony seeds worn as a necklace protected against epileptic seizures, that digging up a peony root in daylight would cause blindness (it must be done at night, with a thread tied to a dog to pull the root), and that the plant gleamed at night with a natural luminescence. These beliefs, recorded in texts from Dioscorides through the medieval herbalists, accumulated around the flower's divine origins like barnacles on a hull. The mythology had created a plant that was simultaneously a medicine, a protective amulet, and a magical object — all because Homer had given a god a physician named after a healing herb.

China developed an entirely parallel tradition of peony cultivation that had nothing to do with Greek mythology. Chinese peonies (Paeonia suffruticosa, the tree peony) were cultivated from at least the seventh century CE during the Tang dynasty, when they became the most prestigious flower in Chinese horticulture. The city of Luoyang became the center of peony cultivation, and during the Tang and Song dynasties, peony festivals attracted visitors from across the empire. A famous passage describes the Tang capital Chang'an during peony season as so flower-obsessed that commerce stopped and the entire city devoted itself to viewing the blooms. The Chinese developed thousands of cultivated varieties across both tree peonies and herbaceous peonies, an aesthetic tradition entirely independent of and contemporaneous with the Greek medicinal tradition.

European interest in the peony as an ornamental rather than primarily a medicinal plant intensified in the nineteenth century, when Japanese and Chinese tree peony varieties were introduced to Western gardens through the same plant-hunting networks that brought orchids, chrysanthemums, and other East Asian plants to Europe. The hybrid cultivars developed from crosses between Eastern and Western species produced the modern garden peony — large-flowered, fragrant, available in colors from white through pink to deep crimson, and exquisitely photogenic. By the late Victorian era, the peony had completed its transformation from divine physician's remedy and magical amulet to the most romantic of garden flowers: full, heavy-headed, briefly but extravagantly beautiful, its petals falling in drifts at the first rain.