CAZENOVIA — On Oct. 11, Jay King and his wife, Anne, hosted a luncheon at “Bag End” (1702 Route 20 West) in Cazenovia in celebration of the planting of a rare “Julia Grant” (1939) Saunders peony.
King purchased the plant in an American Peony Society (APS) auction this past August.
Saunders peonies are the result of the hybridization efforts of Arthur Percy Saunders (1869-1953), the “Father of the Modern Peony.” Saunders served as dean and professor of chemistry at Hamilton College in Clinton, NY, in the decades prior to World War II. According to the APS, he produced both herbaceous peonies — varieties that die back to ground level for the winter — and tree peonies — those with woody above-ground stems — during that time by systematically hybridizing as many species combinations as possible. Through the production of thousands of seedlings, Saunders was able to select many “superior and unique cultivars,” which became known internationally and remain in high demand today.
The Hamilton College website explains that Saunders first crossed the herbaceous Paeonia lactiflora from China with other herbaceous species to produce new hybrids. He later developed hybrid tree peonies by crossing the wild yellow tree peony, Paeonia lutea, with other tree peony species.
According to Lois Girton, who donated the herbaceous Julia Grant peony to the APS auction, Saunders’ peonies are significant because he was the first to make systematic crosses between a large number of species peonies — the wild plants that served as the first generation parents of modern day hybrids and are now rare in nature.
“Currently, most agree [he crossed] 33 species in the genus,” she said.
An Iowa gardener and researcher, Girton is the leading authority on Saunders and his peonies. Her extensive collection includes 125 of Saunders’ named herbaceous peonies and 48 of his woody/tree peonies.
“Many of his crosses have never been repeated,” Girton said. “By crossing herbaceous European species with Chinese lactifloras, he brought in new color combinations and earlier bloom seasons. By crossing suffruticosa woody/tree peonies (whites, shades of pink, red) with the newly discovered (1886) Paeonia lutea and Paeonia delavayi (yellows and reds), he created a line of woody peonies with new colors, especially yellows.”
According to Hamilton College Horticultural Foreperson Dan Rouillier, the school maintains a complete Saunders peony inventory that includes both the varieties it has and those it has yet to acquire.
“Professor Saunders hybridized several hundred plants,” said Rouillier. “Of those, 80 woody/tree peonies were accepted into the [APS]. We currently have 52. Of the herbaceous varieties, 186 were inducted into the APS. We currently have 93, for a total of 145 different cultivars.”
In 1996, Hamilton College’s Grant Garden was redesigned to display the Saunders peony collection, which the college is gradually working to reassemble with help from the APS.
“Many of the plants were ‘lost’ over time,” explained Rouillier. “With that said, our goal is to find and collect as many of the surviving varieties that we can accurately identify and then save them for future generations to enjoy before they too are lost forever.”
Notable lawyer and statesman Elihu Root (1845-1937) created the original Grant Garden for his daughter, Edith Root Grant. Root, who was born in Clinton, graduated from Hamilton College at the top of his class in 1864. He went on to serve his country as Secretary of War under Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, as Roosevelt’s Secretary of State, and then as a U.S. Senator. In 1912, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in international relations. His father, Oren, who was a long-serving professor of mathematics at Hamilton, and his mother, Nancy Buttrick, started the college’s “Root Glen” botanical garden around 1850.
During the Oct. 11 celebration at Bag End, Syracuse native Ulysses Grant Dietz planted the Julia Grant cultivar in honor of his mother and the peony’s namesake, Julia Grant Dietz (1916-2014).
A former Cazenovia resident, Julia was a great granddaughter of Ulysses S. Grant and granddaughter of Root. In addition to her family connection to Hamilton College, Julia worked at the school briefly following her graduation from Bryn Mawr in 1938.
“It’s wonderful to be back in Cazenovia for something like this,” said Dietz. “My folks lived on West Lake Road for 19 years. I remember learning about this peony when I was a kid and that it was named after my mother when she was a teenager 80 years ago. I never knew much about peonies, but it’s really fun to have her name remembered this way, through something that she cared about, because she loved these peonies a lot. She was a big gardener and she had Saunders tree peonies, including this one, at her house in Cazenovia. [However,] those are all gone now, because the house is long sold.”
Girton, who drove the “semi-double” bright pink Julia Grant to Bag End from her Iowa home, assisted Dietz with the planting.
King said he decided to delve into the world of peonies after successfully growing a garden of Intersectional “Itoh” Peonies. Created by crossing a tree peony and an herbaceous peony, these hybrids produce leaves and flower forms resembling those of tree peonies, while the growth habit is similar to that of herbaceous peonies. Once matured (after around five years), each bush typically yields around 50 large blossoms.
“[Two seasons] ago, I had an experiment going on with Itoh Peonies that I had started half a dozen years earlier,” said King. “Anne had just taken on the presidency of the Cazenovia Garden Club and immediately had to cancel all of their meetings because of COVID. I was looking for ways to support her and the club. Originally, we were focused on our antique rose garden, because, when we moved here, Anne was told she wouldn’t be able to grow roses. Then we discovered that we could and [we determined] which ones would thrive. We wanted to share that information, and as people started visiting Bag End, we started to realize, through trial and error, that there was a number of other things we had discovered could grow up here. So I started thinking that we were kind of like a laboratory for what works in Cazenovia gardens. We expanded the number of open garden events and shared [our findings]. It was very obvious that we were showing people — mostly enthusiastic gardeners — some things they didn’t know about . . . When the Itoh garden came in, that was so exciting and I got really wrapped up in peonies.”
King added that he discovered Saunders’ work at Hamilton College only after learning that the APS would be holding its 2023 annual convention in Syracuse. At that point, he started looking into the organization’s ties to Central New York and ways in which Bag End could serve as a resource to APS members during their stay.
“I realized that here was something really exciting that I didn’t know anything about,” he said. “I think the same is true of people all around here . . . Anne and I had never been [to Hamilton College] when these peonies were blooming, and I didn’t have a single Saunders peony in our collection at Bag End . . . I thought ‘Gee, I don’t know about any places around here that have more peonies than we do, but I think I’d like to step up our game.’ It’s certainly embarrassing not to have a single Saunders peony in our collection, so I decided to put in a whole garden of [them].”
Once completed, the new garden will include not only the Julia Grant and over 50 other varieties, but also a rare “Celestial” tree peony gifted to the Kings by Carol T. Bradford, a longtime garden columnist for The Post-Standard whose mother served as Saunders’ secretary.
According to King, Bradford acquired the plant decades ago when Cornell University ripped up its Saunders peonies and offered them to the public.
“I don’t think even Hamilton has [the Celestial],” he noted.
King explained that the goals of his planting event/luncheon were to raise awareness of the importance of the Saunders peonies and of Hamilton’s mission to recover and preserve the Saunders collection.
“What I am hoping to do is to launch an effort to help the Grant peony gardens by pursuing an idea I have that there are lots of the lost varieties lurking in area gardens here in Upstate New York,” King said. “ . . . They must be out here. We can spread the word and get people looking for them, and maybe they’ll make some connections in their heads that they wouldn’t have made otherwise.”
The Kings purchased Bag End — named after the home of “Lord of the Rings” author J.R.R. Tolkien’s Baggins family — in the late 1970s from prominent Cazenovian Jimmy Hubbard. The couple moved to the property from the Sedgwick neighborhood in Syracuse Located on Fairchild Hill overlooking Cazenovia Lake, Bag End features two antique barns that were moved and renovated by builder and historical barn expert Randy Nash. The Kings lived in the 1795 barn home for 23 years before making it available to Cazenovia visitors for short-term rentals.
To learn more about Bag End, visit cazenoviabagend.com/index.php.
Additional information on the Julia Grant and other Saunders peonies is available on Girton’s website at saunderspeonies.com.
