Chinese Peony Exhibition (2000): Home

From the exhibit catalog:

Welcome to the Chinese Peony Exhibition at The New York Botanical Garden. With this exhibition, we have transformed the seasonal exhibit glasshouses of the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory into a glorious Chinese garden experience. The horticultural diva of the exhibit is the mudan, the Chinese Tree Peony. These extraordinary plants offer an unusual combination of enticing and ethereal blooms produced by a remarkably resilient garden shrub. Outdoors, they flower in early May and have been sequentially forced into bloom for this exhibition. The tree peonies are kept company by a host of other interesting and beautiful plants used in traditional Chinese gardens.

The mudan has been revered in China for centuries as a garden plant and cultural icon, but it has been much less well known and little grown in North America. It's time for that to change.

We invite you to experience this extraordinary exhibition and allow yourself to be captivated by the enchanting beauty of the peonies and gardens of China.

Kim Tripp,

Vice President for Horticulture and Living Collections 

Illustration from Aimé Bonpland, Description des plantes rares cultivées à Malmaison et à Navarre, published in Paris in 1813, in the collection of The LuEsther T. Mertz Library at The New York Botanical Garden.