Peonies of the World - Look inside - Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

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vi PEONIES OF THE WORLD SYNOPSIS SYNOPSIS The present monograph presents a taxonomic revision of the genus Paeonia based on extensive field observations, population sampling, and statistical analysis of various characters. All specimens available from 65 herbaria were examined and identified, and thus there is a list of herbarium specimens examined and their species designations. The monograph recognises three sections, sect. moutan DC., sect. Onaepia Lindl. and sect. Paeonia. Two subsections are recognised in sect. Moutan: subsect. Delavayanae Stern and subsect. Vaginatae Stern. I recognise three subsections in sect. Paeonia: subsect. Paeonia, subsect. Albiflorae (Salm-Dyck) D. Y. Hong, and subsect. Foliolatae Stern. The subsection Albiflorae (Salm-Dyck) D. Y. Hong is a new status of sect. Albiflorae Salm-Dyck (1834). Thirty-two species and 26 subspecies of wild peonies are recognized in the monograph, including a new subspecies from Croatia, Paeonia daurica Andrews subsp. velebitensis D. Y. Hong. Each species is described, its distribution is mapped, and its relationships with other species are discussed in detail. The monograph reports 23 chromosome countings, including five new records: Paeonia intermedia C. A. Mey. (2n=10), P. qiui Y. L. Pei & D. Y. Hong (2n = 10), P. sterniana H. R. Fletcher (2n = 10), P. rockii subsp. rockii (2n = 10), and a new chromosome number for P. emodi Wall. ex Royle (2n = 20). The monograph contains six colour plates, three black and white plates, 78 line drawings of plants, and 39 maps. Twelve lectotypes and 17 neotypes are newly designated, and more than 40 taxa are reduced as synonymy (syn. nov.).
PEONIES OF THE WORLD PREFACE vii PREFACE My monograph on the genus Paeonia will comprise three parts. This book, covering taxonomy and phytogeography, is the first. The second will illustrate the polymorphism and diversity within the genus with colour photographs taken in the field, accompanied by short descriptions; and the third will deal with phylogeny and evolution. In the summer of 1984, DAI Lung-Kai, chief officer of the Research Department at the Institute of Botany, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, informed me that I should put forward a proposal for a project to be funded by a generous grant of 50,000 RMB from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The grant was especially for scholars returned from overseas, and I had been a visiting scholar in Sweden from 1979 to 1981. In choosing my subject, I wished to reflect a combination of academic and public interests, and I had already been thinking about the genus Paeonia. My wife, PAN Kai-Yu, a botanist and author of Paeonia for Flora Reipublicae Popularis Sinicae (Vol. 27, 1979), encouraged me to study this interesting group. The genus Paeonia has been culturally significant in both the East and West for millennia. Tree peony has long been called ‘King of Flowers’ in China, and the herbaceous peony was called ‘Queen of Herbs’ in ancient Greece. Systematically, the genus Paeonia is isolated from other groups of angiosperms in many respects; for example, its embryogenesis involves the existence of a free nuclei stage, the coenocytic proembryo, it contains unique chemical compounds, e.g. paeoniflorin, its anthroecia undergo centrifugal development, and chromosome behaviour at meiosis shows permanent structural hybridity. The origin of the cultivated tree peony, whose wild relatives are all endemic to China, also struck us as worthy of investigation. My work on Paeonia started in the spring of 1985, when I collected materials for cytotaxonomy in Sichuan, Shaanxi and Hebei provinces with assistance from ZHU Xian-Yun. This work was published in two papers: Hong et al. 1988 and Hong 1989. Three events that bolstered the Paeonia project took place shortly afterwards. First, in 1990, Peter Raven, president of the Missouri Botanical Garden, encouraged me to increase my focus on Paeonia when I mentioned it as one of several projects in our laboratory. Second, in 1991, Tao SANG (now at Michigan State University) sought my advice on whether he should take Paeonia as the subject of the dissertation project for his Ph.D (at Ohio State University). I suggested that we divide the work: he should work on molecular systematics and evolution while I continued to work on taxonomy, mainly based on morphology. Since then, we have been in successful collaboration. Third, Dr Wilhelm Sauer invited me and my wife to work at Tübingen University in Germany for three months, starting in November 1991. He kindly borrowed for us thousands of Paeonia specimens from a number of major European herbaria. Readers will readily note differences in the number of species recognised and their circumscriptions when comparing the present work with previous monographs or revisions of Paeonia. Baker (1884) recognised 22 species, of which only eight are identical or partly identical to those described in this monograph. Lynch (1890) described 25 species, but only six correspond with those described in this work. Huth (1891) recognised 14 species, of which again only six agree with my taxa/taxonomic view. Stern’s (1946) monograph of the genus Paeonia has been the most widely
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