My Backyard - Denise Cowie, Inquirer Staff
A wonderland of peonies
It's the flower of the hour, and peonies of all kinds decorate the Bucks County nursery, and the vision, of one grower.
Michael Hsu has a vision for PeonyLand, the 54-acre nursery in Bucks County where he grows Chinese tree peonies and the herbaceous peonies that complement them.
"I want it to look like a real display garden," with a network of pathways to make it more people-friendly, he said late last week, looking out over an expanse of beds in which the tree peonies had finished blooming but the herbaceous peonies were getting into full frilly flower.
Tree peonies, the national flower of China, are enjoying a surge of popularity in American gardens, and PeonyLand, Hsu believes, has the largest collection of Chinese tree peonies outside China. His Web site boasts 60,000 plants in about 600 varieties, as well as scores of herbaceous peony cultivars.
But PeonyLand is more than just a business to Hsu. "Everything we have here is Asian-inspired. It reflects me and my family," he said, not to mention cultural associations stretching back to the Sui and Tang Dynasties in the seventh century, when tree peonies began to be important in Chinese art and poetry.
He envisions families coming to wander among the beds each spring, picking out peonies they want to buy or simply enjoying the beautiful flowers while their children are entertained by the pygmy goats he owns, or the miniature horses and maybe a buffalo he'd like to add.
He already has the picturesque setting. At the front of the property in Richlandtown, mature trees outline the driveway and provide a background for the five-acre display garden featuring numerous cultivars of the nursery's stars - the Chinese tree peonies, which are planted in blocks so visitors can check them out by variety and flower color (purple, maroon, lavender, white, purple-red, pink and multicolored).
These bushes, imported from China, are young and still fairly small, but they have already flowered and eventually will put on a regal show to echo that country's peony festivals.
"This is the first year we've actually seen all our flowers bloom at once," he said. Tree peonies are woody shrubs that generally flower from late April into May, and herbaceous peonies, which die back to the ground in winter, flower from May into June.
Hsu is in Year Four of a five-year plan. Most of that time has been spent renovating the house and farm buildings and planting thousands of bare-root peonies.
But he has come a long way: Four years ago, he said, he scarcely knew what a tree peony was. Now, he lives at the farm and spends most of his time working there, often hoeing weeds from the rows by hand. "Once I started doing this, I really got to enjoy it," he said. "It helps me get in touch with my heritage."
His timing was ideal. Interest in tree peonies is booming, said Jeff Jabco, director of grounds and horticulture coordinator for Scott Arboretum at Swarthmore College, who immersed himself in peony culture about six years ago before moving some of the arboretum's tree peonies because of construction. The collection there, which dates to 1931, contains Chinese, Japanese and American hybrid plants.
"I think peonies are just going to get more and more popular," said Jabco, who hosted a sold-out workshop on tree peonies last month. "Every major gardening magazine in the country has featured them this year, and The Garden [from the Royal Horticultural Society] and Garden Illustrated in England also had major articles on them."
Tree peonies originated in western China, where they are native to mountainous country with an open canopy, so they are essentially understory woody shrubs that like dry summers and high shade. In the eighth century, Japan began importing a small selection of tree peonies, Jabco said, and its breeding developed from that. Most tree peonies out of China were Paeonia suffruticosa, and it wasn't until the late 1800s that breeders in Britain, France and the United States began getting some other species that they crossed with suffruticosa to develop the European and American hybrids.
Depending on the variety, tree peonies can mature at anywhere from 3 to 8 or 9 feet, and flowers come in a dazzling array of flower type, color and size; some blossoms are 10 inches wide.
"They're very good plants, they live forever, they flower reliably, and they don't have many insect or disease problems, just some gray mold if it's a really wet spring," Jabco said. "The tree peony makes a great specimen plant, or it can be mixed in a border."
"People look at them as a sophisticated landscaping plant," said Hsu, who likes to see them surrounded by the shorter herbaceous peonies, a combination he has in his personal garden in Richlandtown. One herbaceous peony he plans to offer is Golden Wheel, a hard-to-come-by yellow that is also somewhat harder to grow.
Tree peonies, on the other hand, are easy to grow and almost carefree once they are established, Hsu said, and they can take more shade than their herbaceous relatives, as little as four hours of sun a day. Even deer don't bother them, probably because they taste bitter. The one thing that will surely kill them is standing water. And they should be planted only in fall.
However exotic his crop, Hsu, 31, seems an unlikely candidate to become a farmer - or grower, as he prefers. The son of two medical scientists who came to the United States from Taiwan as graduate students in the '60s, he spent most of his childhood in Baltimore before moving to Philadelphia and graduating from Drexel University in 1992 with a business degree. He also studied in Beijing for a year.
In 1997, he was driving around the countryside with his father, Chao-Kuang Hsu, who is known as C.K., when something happened that changed his life.
"We got lost in Upper Bucks, and we saw this sign for a farm for sale," he recalled. "My dad always wanted a farm, and we stumbled on this." So they bought it. "For the first two years, all we did was renovate the property, [but] we thought we should do something with the land, because I didn't want to mow 50 acres."
Some of their friends, including Betty Foo, sister-in-law of Philadelphia restaurateur Susanna Foo, suggested tree peonies. So father and son, who were already business partners in a variety of ventures, went to Luoyang in China, the center of the country's peony cultivation and trade. They formed a partnership with a large peony nursery that is part of an agricultural conglomerate in Luoyang, studied tree-peony culture there, and began importing thousands of the plants.
"I wasn't a gardener," Michael Hsu said. "I learned everything in China. We travel there three or four times a year, learning new ways to propagate or better ways to plant them, and we look for new varieties. We have five varieties that are patented, [including] a beautiful lavender one that has two petals that stick out from the center of the flower like a butterfly." Like most Chinese cultivars, it has a poetic name, Butterfly on Lavender Jade.
Because of U.S. regulations against importing soil, he said, "the plants are power-washed in China before they are sent over, which washes off not only the soil, but the little feeder roots. We [plant them] so they can grow those feeder roots again, and adjust to this environment. And until you see a bloom, you don't know whether you are actually getting what the plant's label says it is." His tree peonies have been sold at such area nurseries as Waterloo Gardens and J. Franklin Styer, and he also sells both retail and wholesale at PeonyLand, where retail prices start around $50 and go up to about $300, with some more expensive.
But he's not making any money at it yet. "Our other businesses pay for this very expensive hobby we have," he joked. Tree peonies, he pointed out, grow slowly and require patience, but they last a long time.
"It's really a metaphor for the Chinese culture, the whole way of thinking in China," he said. "We're willing to wait for good things to happen. Hopefully it will be worth it in the end."