Bio of Fangyun Cheng

Dr. Fangyun Cheng is a professor at Beijing Forestry University where he teaches Ornamental Plant Propagation and Nursery Management.  Dr. Cheng’s research interest is focused on the breeding and propagation of ornamental plants, especially Paeonia. He is a leading authority and researcher on tree peonies.

Fangyun grew up in a village in Gansu province in Northwest China near where there are still wild populations of the tree peony P. rockii. Fangyun’s interest in peonies was stimulated early in life by his grandfather who grew various ornamentals, including two classic cultivars of tree peony.

Fangyun Cheng obtained his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from the Biology Department of Northwest Normal University, Lanzhou, China where he majored in Botany.  For the Ph.D. degree he majored in Ornamental Plants in the College of Landscape Architecture of Beijing Forestry University, Beijing, China. Following completion of his Master’s degree in 1987, he started his research work on the Mudan as the tree peony is known in China and he taught biology for approximately 10 years in Lanzhou. Following completion of his Ph.D., he spent two years as a special researcher of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), at Shimane University, Matsue, Japan, studying relationships of Japanese and Chinese cultivars of P. suffruticosa. Since 2000, Dr. Cheng has been a professor in the College of Landscape Architecture of Beijing Forestry University.

Dr. Cheng’s research is mainly on tree peonies endemic to China. It is focused mostly on two topics, breeding and propagation of both species and cultivars directed towards the sustainable development of the peony industry in China.  Studies by Dr. Cheng on Rockii hybrids led to the publication of the book “Chinese Flare Mudan” in 2005.

He has received many awards for his teaching and research on peonies. Dr. Cheng’s research group is composed primarily of M.Sc. and Ph.D. students working on a wide variety of research topics on tree peonies.

The propagation of tree peonies is difficult and slow and therefore Dr. Cheng has spent many years investigating methods to improve peony propagation techniques including micro propagation by tissue culture. He also works on the domestication of tree peonies from wild peony species. Other studies include the genetic and hormonal controls of re-blooming in tree peonies, the genetic relationships among tree peony species and hybrid origins of different cultivars using gene sequencing and markers. Dr. Cheng has done extensive studies on the endangered tree peony, Paeonia rockii and worked to conserve this and other endemic species. In addition to working on peonies as ornamental plants, Dr. Cheng has also been investigating the potential of tree peonies as an oil seed crop in China.

Make Your Own Itohs

By Reiner Jakubowski

240-07 (Rare China x Golden Era)

240-02 (Rare China x Golden Era)

The Itoh Group hybrids are peonies, which result from the cross Lactiflora x Lutea Hybrid.
Lactiflora here means the Lactiflora Group, which includes all the cultivars believed to have descended over hundreds of years of breeding from the wild species lactiflora.  It is the convention in controlled breeding that the female parent is listed first, therefore, Lactiflora (the seed parent) pollinated by Lutea Hybrid (the pollen parent).  The Lutea Hybrid Group peonies traditionally result from crosses between the Chinese and Japanese tree peonies (Suffruticosa Group) and the yellow-flowered Paeonia lutea, and later the dark red flowered P. delavayi. Today the taxonomists have decided that lutea is only a colour phase of delavayi.  Lutea hybrids were originally bred
for yellow flowers; but, today are available in a wider colour range.  The Lutea Hybrid Group brings into the cross distinctive characteristics, such as yellow or variegated flowers, rapid growth, good vigour and late flowering.
There is no magic involved, only perseverance, patience, and a little luck. Anyone can do it. The most important thing is to have a fertile pollen parent and initially one of the proven Lutea Hybrids will give more certain results. There are several choices; 'Golden Era', 'Golden Experience', 'Alice in Wonderland', and 'Alice Harding' are good choices if you want yellows. Try 'Boreas', and 'Chinese Dragon' if you want red Itohs. The colour of the Lactiflora parent also plays a role in colour and you may not get what you expect, so these are offered only as suggestions.
My experience has been that the Lactiflora side of the cross is not so critical and you probably already have something suitable growing in the garden. My preference is to use double or  semi-double flowers because these have given a higher proportion of hybrid blooms showing doubling tendencies than have the singles or bomb forms that I have used. I have seedlings from 'Fragrans' (bomb), 'Rare China' (semi-double), 'Adolphe Rousseau' (flower-in-flower doubling but usually so open a flower that it shows as a semi-double). I also have seedlings from other Lactifloras ('Glenny Carlene', 'Susan B. White', 'Doreen', 'Marie Crousse' and others), but these have not yet bloomed.

240-10 (Rare China x Golden Era)

253-01 (Adolphe Rousseau x Golden Era)

274-39 (Fragrans x Golden Era)

It is best to make protected crosses – that is, to take precautions to prevent contamination from unwanted pollen. This does mean having to strip the intended seed parent of petals and stamens before the flower opens, and then apply the wanted pollen on the stigmas, followed by covering the fertilized flower with either a paper bag or envelope. It is also essential that you tag the pollinated flower so that you know at harvest what the parentage was.  I use a number for each cross; thus #1022 is 'Susan B. White' x 'Golden Era'; #1116 is 'Glenny Carlene' x 'Alice Harding'; and #1229 is 'Fragrans' x 'Alice in Wonderland'. When the seeds germinate and I have seedlings growing, they retain the cross number until I decide whether I will keep them or will cull them. If I keep them for further observation, I just append a number to the cross number – for example, 274-45, 274-39, and 274-43 are all from the cross 'Fragrans' x 'Golden Era' made in 2003. Seedlings 240-02, 240-07, and 240-10 are from 'Rare China' x'Golden Era' also made in 2003; and, finally 253-01 is from 'Adolphe Rousseau' x 'Golden Era'.  The Itoh Cross (Lactiflora x Lutea"Hybrid) has become relatively easy to make, provided you use a known fertile pollen parent. Some years I have more seeds than other years for reasons I do not fully understand; but I usually get a few seeds every year. If you make enough of these crosses you should get some seeds.
descended over hundreds of years of breeding from the wild species lactiflora.

274-43 (Frangrans x Golden Era)

 If you want a bigger challenge, then make the cross in the reverse direction, using the Lutea Hybrid as the seed parent and the Lactiflora as the pollen parent. 'Reverse Magic' (Don R. Smith, 2002) is from 'Age of Gold' x lactiflora 'Martha W.' Also possible, but very difficult, is to use one of the Suffruticosa Group tree peonies instead of the Lutea Hybrid.  'Impossible Dream' (Don R. Smith,
2004) is from 'Stolen Heaven' x 'Martha W.' Note that this cross was made with the tree peony as the
seed parent.  If you make your own Itohs, always look for pollen from your seedlings. Pollen allows you to try back crossing to one of the parents, or to cross Itoh x Itoh. I have  

274-45 (Fragrans x Golden Era)

found two of my seedlings with fertile pollen and have seedlings from Tolomeo #22, Tolomeo #58, 'Fragrans', and 'Doreen', all pollinated with 274-39. (The numbered Tolomeo seedlings were raised by Irene Tolomeo in California and are the lactiflora parents of 'Sonoma YeDo' and 'Sonoma Halo'
respectively.)
Information on growing from seeds is available from the Canadian Peony Society, or contact Reiner Jakubowski at the Society’s mailing address or by email at reiner@kw.igs.net should you have any question.

Hybridizing Peonies

The First Step

New cultivars of garden peonies are grown from seeds. At the turn of the twentieth century the procedure was to collect all the seeds you could find in your field, perhaps with preference given to seeds produced on favoured cultivars, and plant them directly into the ground. Some of these growers would plant a bushel of seeds each year, and that’s a lot of seedlings. This method of developing new cultivars worked sufficiently well then because in North America there were relatively few peonies considered exceptional. There was lots of room for improvement and planting a bushel of seeds offered a reasonable chance of coming up with something worthwhile and different. Integral to this method was the need for considerable arable land to grow thousands of seedlings. Times have changed.

Today, and over the last fifty years or more, the majority of the work at improving the peony has been done by relatively small nurseries and by interested backyard gardeners. In reality, the most significant improvements in the peony have always been made by enthusiasts working in their spare time primarily out of interest. Regardless , today if you are to accomplish anything worthwhile, you will have to give a bit more thought  to end goals and how they might be achieved. In a backyard garden you do not have the room to plant thousands of seedlings and raise them to blooming size. Fewer seeds of higher potential should be the basic tenet of the back yard peony breeder, and that takes a little planning.
An important part of planning will be selection of parents. This is not to say that you don’t already have peonies in your garden that would be useful in a breeding program, but only that a plan or two (or four) will help focus your efforts. Having knowledge of what has been done with certain peonies in raising new cultivars, or the pedigrees of the peonies you have in your garden, would be a great help in formulating a plan built around peonies you might already have, or as a tool in selecting new cultivars to be introduced into your garden.
Parentage information is available, but you have to hunt for it in resources that are not often readily obtainable, or are organized in a manner to make searching an exercise in tedium and frustration. Peony registration documentation, as published since 1923 by the American Peony Society in their quarterly Bulletin, yields the bulk of the information to be found. The work of Professor A. P. Saunders is fairly well covered in The Peonies, (1962), edited by John C. Wister, in the chapter written by Silvia Saunders. Nursery catalogues often give parentage information in the descriptions, and then there are scattered references in articles published in the APS Bulletin over the years. It is not all easy to find, and some sources contradict each other, so a reasonable amount of judgement must sometimes be exercised when evaluating the information given.
A recent search for peony pedigrees has turned up over 800 records and this information is published below. Each record is referenced to a source document. Research too needs a pedigree. There are columns for the pod parent, and for the pollen parent. The convention for many years has been to list the pod (seed, female) parent first in the generally used written format “pod parent x pollen parent.” The assumption has been made that this was always the case, but there are many instances where different sources have them reversed  for the same cultivar. The published “registration” information was taken as correct in these cases, unless other reliable sources supported changing them. The surest way to impart this information would have been to state which is pod and which is pollen parent, but few did it this way.
In some cases species peonies were listed as one of the parents. In the case of the officinalis peonies there were in cultivation several named selections, and these are specified in some listings. However, where officinalis on its own is given, one can’t assume that it was a wild species rather than one of the cultivated selections. As an example, Saunders very early on raised a chance seedling of some officinalis cultivar, pedigree unknown, which he used in some of his hybridizing work. Where known, this is specified, but in most cases the available information just doesn’t support saying anything more than “officinalis.”
In all cases where “Lactiflora” was given as a parent, it was one of the cultivated varieties. Where the lactiflora parent was specified, the cultivar name is used, otherwise it is listed as “Lactiflora cvr.” to signify a cultivar rather than the species.  In no instance was there any indication that a species lactiflora was used, and to do so would have been to lose the benefit of hundreds of years of breeding effort that the Lactiflora Group make available to us.
Where the term “unknown” is used, it almost always means that pollination was left to natural vectors. In those cases where the pod parent has its own viable pollen, this is likely to have been self pollination. Where the term “self” is used, this means that the hybridizer manually pollinated the flower with pollen of the same cultivar, or at least this was suggested from the information provided. Whether the pollen came from the same flower, a different flower on the same plant, or from a different plant of the same cultivar, all result in the bloom being considered self pollinated.
The list is incomplete. There are other available sources which have not yet been tabulated and periodic updates, including corrections, will be made to the list. Nevertheless, the more than 800 peonies already listed will give the potential hybridizer plenty of food for thought.


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 .csv file for use with local spreadsheet or database