Most people are more than happy to simply grow some peony plants in their garden and enjoy them. There are many cultivars to choose from, different in many ways: flower form, color, height, stem strength, blooming time, health, number of stems, fragrance, leaf form, and so on. The impressive number of available cultivars has been built up over hundreds of years and it is still increasing as hybridizers all over the world are working with peonies. Nate Bremer (interviewed here on Southern Peony), from Solaris Farms (Wisconsin, USA), is such an active hybridizer with many recent introductions by his hand. You can check the peony registry at the American Peony Society (APS) to see a list of his introductions. He has written an excellent introduction to hybridizing with peonies and if you’re only slightly interested in trying to grow your own cultivar one day this might be the last nudge you need to go about it 🙂
Nate Bremer’s nursery, click to visit.
If you start with it, you might as well join the APS as they have lots of information about peonies and hybridizing. Most hybridizers are part of it anyway and next to that they are the official registration authority for new cultivars. There are also some facebook groups that bring together peony hybridizers, although we can only recommend them half-heartedly. And last, though not least, you can also join the ‘hybridizer’s corner’ group on this site, where there are several active hybridizers.
You can click on any image to enlarge it and from there on you can easily click the arrows to go to the next slide.
Many thanks to Nate Bremer for allowing us to publish this here.
If you’d like to download a pdf-file of this: Peonies From Seed – Nate Bremer PDF
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