There are flowers that suggest, and flowers that insist. The peony insists. It arrives in late spring with an extravagance that is almost embarrassing — enormous, ruffled, impossibly layered blooms in shades from the palest blush white through cream, coral, rose, magenta, and the deepest wine-red, each flower releasing a scent that is at once fresh and heady, clean and intoxicating. A peony in full bloom is not a subtle thing. It does not ask to be noticed; it simply opens, wider and wider over the course of several days, until it has become something so abundant and so generous that it seems to belong to a different order of existence than ordinary flowers.
Yet the peony’s symbolic history is as rich and layered as its petals, and considerably more complex than its opulent appearance might suggest. It is simultaneously the flower of prosperity and of shame, of healing and of danger, of feminine beauty at its most celebrated and feminine power at its most feared. It has been the national flower of China for over a thousand years, the emblem of nobility and imperial ambition, the subject of imperial competitions and poetic obsession. It has been used in Western medicine from ancient Greece to the early modern period as a treatment for conditions from epilepsy to nightmares. It has been the flower of the Gilded Age and of the contemporary wedding, of Chinese New Year celebrations and of Japanese temple gardens. To understand the peony fully is to discover that the most extravagant things are rarely, at their core, simple.
The Name and Its Origins: The God of Healing
The peony takes its name from Paeon, the physician to the gods in Greek mythology. In Homer’s Iliad, Paeon is the divine healer who treats the wounds of Ares and Hades when they are injured in battle — a figure of considerable importance in a narrative defined by injury and death. According to one tradition, Paeon discovered the healing properties of the peony root while gathering plants on Mount Olympus under the instruction of the goddess Leto.
The myth of the peony’s origin, however, centres not on Paeon’s discovery but on what happened afterward. Paeon’s teacher was Asclepius, the god of medicine, who was himself the greatest physician in the divine world. When Asclepius saw that his student had discovered a plant of remarkable healing power — the peony — he was consumed by jealousy. Zeus intervened to save Paeon from his teacher’s wrath by transforming him into the flower that bore his name. The peony thus began its symbolic life as a flower of healing turned, through jealousy, into a flower of transformation — a reminder that knowledge is dangerous, that the student who surpasses the teacher risks destruction, and that the most powerful remedies carry their own peril.
This founding myth establishes several of the peony’s enduring symbolic characteristics: its connection to medicine and healing, its association with dangerous knowledge, and its origin in a story of jealousy and divine transformation. The flower that grew from a healer’s body is a flower that contains healing within itself — but also the memory of why that healing had to be hidden in petals rather than practised openly.
Ancient Greece and Rome: Medicine, Magic, and the Warding of Evil
The peony’s medical reputation in the ancient world was considerable. Theophrastus, Dioscorides, and Pliny the Elder all discuss the peony as a medicinal plant, and their accounts reveal a symbolic world in which the boundary between medicine and magic was permeable and the peony operated on both sides of it simultaneously.
The root of the peony was the primary medicinal part, used to treat conditions including epilepsy, nightmares, menstrual disorders, and complications of childbirth. Pliny records that the peony root was effective against what he called the “lunar disease” — epilepsy, so named because of its association with the phases of the moon. The peony’s power over epilepsy gave it a particular symbolic status: it was a flower that addressed conditions that seemed to originate in the invisible world, in forces beyond rational control, in whatever it was that caused a person to fall and convulse without warning. To control these conditions was to operate at the boundary of the known and the unknown.
The method of harvesting peony root, as described by ancient authors, was itself elaborately magical. The root, it was said, must be dug at night, because the woodpecker — the bird sacred to Mars — would peck out the eyes of anyone who dug it in daylight. A string was to be tied to the root and attached to a dog, who would be induced to pull it from the ground, transferring to the dog whatever curse attached to the uprooting. The dog would then die, a sacrifice for the sake of the medicine. Whether or not anyone actually followed this procedure, its prescription tells us something important about how the peony was understood: as a plant that existed at the edge of safety, whose power was real but not to be approached without ritual precaution.
This association with protective magic extended beyond medicine. In ancient Rome, peony seeds were worn as necklaces by children as amulets against evil spirits and nightmares. The peony was a guardian flower — beautiful, powerful, and protective, a ward against the invisible dangers that menaced especially the vulnerable.
China: The King of Flowers
No culture in the world has a relationship with the peony as long, as deep, or as elaborately documented as China. The peony — mudan in Mandarin — has been cultivated in China for over two thousand years and has been designated, in various periods, the national flower. It is the subject of an extensive body of poetry, painting, ceramics, textile design, and philosophy, and it carries meanings that ramify through every dimension of Chinese cultural life.
The peony’s arrival at the centre of Chinese symbolism appears to have accelerated during the Tang Dynasty (618–907 AD), when it became the flower of the imperial court and a symbol of wealth, honour, and aristocratic distinction. The Tang capital of Luoyang became — and remains — the peony capital of China, hosting an annual peony festival that has been running for over a thousand years. During the Tang period, rare peony varieties commanded prices that recalled the Dutch tulipomania of the seventeenth century: a single bulb of an unusual colour or form might cost as much as a city residence.
The poet Liu Yuxi, writing in the Tang period, encapsulated the peony’s symbolic status in lines that have been quoted ever since: “Among all the flowers that have appeared since the beginning of time, only the peony is truly the flower of kings.” This assessment — that the peony sits above all other flowers in the hierarchy of beauty and honour — established a position that Chinese culture has maintained, with remarkable consistency, ever since.
The peony’s specific symbolic meanings in Chinese tradition are multiple and deeply interwoven:
Wealth and prosperity. The peony’s lush, many-layered blooms, its fullness and abundance, made it a natural symbol of material good fortune. In Chinese decorative arts, peonies are among the most common motifs for objects associated with wealth, celebration, and the wish for continued prosperity. To give peonies or to display peony imagery is to invoke the wish for abundance — in money, in family, in health, in all the forms that a good life might take.
Honour and high status. The peony’s association with the imperial court gave it an indelible connection to the idea of legitimate authority and distinguished rank. It appears on the robes of court officials, in imperial garden design, and in the decorative programmes of temples and palaces. To be compared to a peony was to be recognised as being of the highest human quality.
Female beauty and the feminine principle. In Chinese poetic tradition, the peony is one of the primary symbols of feminine beauty — specifically, beauty of the most fully developed and most powerful kind. The peony does not suggest the delicate, barely-there beauty of early spring; it represents beauty in full maturity, beauty that has achieved its maximum force and presence. The comparison of a woman to a peony was the highest possible compliment: it said that her beauty was complete, powerful, and belonged to the highest order of natural things.
Spring and romance. The peony blooms in late spring, and its association with the season gives it connections to romance, sexual love, and the pleasures of youth. In classical Chinese poetry, a young woman going to admire the peonies in the garden is also going in search of love — the flower and the feeling are interchangeable in this tradition.
Good fortune in marriage. Peony imagery is extensively used in Chinese wedding traditions, where the flower’s associations with beauty, abundance, and the fullness of life make it an obvious emblem of what a marriage should contain. Peony patterns appear on wedding textiles, ceramics, and decorations, and the gift of peonies for a wedding is one of the most traditionally appropriate gestures in Chinese culture.
The Legend of Wu Zetian and the Banished Peony
Among the many stories that cluster around the peony in Chinese tradition, none is more famous or more symbolically rich than the legend of Wu Zetian and the winter flowers. Wu Zetian (624–705 AD) was the only woman in Chinese history to rule in her own right as Emperor. She was brilliant, ruthless, and deeply interested in power in all its forms — including the symbolic power of flowers.
The legend runs as follows. During a harsh winter, Wu Zetian issued a command to all the flowers in her garden: bloom now, tonight, for my pleasure. The flowers, obedient to imperial command, bloomed — all of them except the peony, which alone among all the garden’s flowers refused. Wu Zetian, furious, had all the peonies in the imperial garden banished from the capital to Luoyang, where they were to live in exile as punishment for their defiance.
The peonies, undeterred, bloomed more magnificently in Luoyang than they ever had in the capital, and Luoyang became the greatest peony city in China — a status it retains to this day.
The legend is richly symbolic on multiple levels. The peony that refuses the Emperor’s command is the flower that cannot be bent to power — that insists on blooming in its own time, according to its own nature, regardless of what authority demands. In a culture where resistance to imperial command was dangerous to the point of being almost unthinkable, the peony’s defiance carries enormous weight. It is the flower that says: I answer to a higher authority than the Emperor. I answer to nature itself, to the proper order of seasons, to what is true rather than what is commanded.
The fact that the defiant peonies bloomed more magnificently in exile than they had in the capital adds another layer: exile and punishment cannot diminish what is genuinely excellent. Adversity, for the peony, does not reduce beauty but intensifies it. This made the peony a beloved symbol among scholars and officials who found themselves out of favour with the court — the flower of those who maintained their integrity in difficult circumstances.
Japan: Wealth, Bravery, and the Lion Dance
The peony — botan in Japanese — was introduced to Japan from China in the eighth century and has been cultivated there ever since, particularly in Buddhist temple gardens where it became associated with the spiritual ideals of the monastic life: beauty as a vehicle for contemplation, the impermanence of the most extravagant blooms as a lesson in non-attachment.
In Japanese symbolic tradition, the peony carries meanings somewhat different from its Chinese origins. It is associated with wealth and good fortune, as in China, but also with bravery and masculine courage — a meaning that might seem unexpected for so demonstrably voluptuous a flower. This masculine association derives partly from the peony’s traditional pairing with the lion in Japanese decorative arts: the shishi (lion-dog) and the botan appear together in countless paintings, sculptures, and architectural carvings, a pairing so common that it has its own name — shishi-botan, the lion and peony.
The association is explained in Japanese tradition through a story that the lion, king of beasts and symbol of courage, can only be tamed by resting in peony blossoms. The peony is thus not merely a beautiful flower but a power capable of gentling the most formidable of creatures — a symbol of the kind of beauty and grace that transcends even the greatest strength. In this reading the peony represents not weakness but the superior force of gentleness: the power that does not need to dominate because it cannot be dominated.
The peony appears extensively in Japanese tattooing tradition, where it typically represents wealth, good fortune, and the willingness to take risks — the flower of the gambler, the adventurer, and the person who understands that the greatest rewards require the acceptance of uncertainty. A peony tattoo in traditional Japanese irezumi carries a meaning that connects beauty to courage in a way that no other flower quite manages.
The Peony in Western Medicine: From Antiquity to the Early Modern Period
The peony’s medical reputation, established in ancient Greece and Rome, persisted throughout the Western medical tradition into the early modern period, with the flower serving as a remedy for an extraordinary range of conditions over more than two thousand years.
In medieval European herbalism, the peony root — and particularly the seeds, which were strung on necklaces in the Roman tradition — retained their association with epilepsy and with the protection of sleeping people from nightmare demons. The Venerable Bede mentions the peony as a remedy; Hildegard of Bingen discusses its properties; countless herbals from the twelfth through the seventeenth centuries include it among their essential remedies.
The peony was also used in European folk medicine for conditions including jaundice, kidney disease, and the complications of difficult childbirth. It was a women’s plant in the European tradition as in the Chinese — a flower whose healing power was particularly directed toward the conditions and vulnerabilities of the female body, giving it a connection to feminine life that went deeper than aesthetic association.
By the early modern period, as botanical knowledge became more systematised and scepticism about magical remedies grew, the peony’s medical reputation began to decline. But the symbolic residue of two thousand years of medical use remained: the peony as a flower that heals, that protects, that addresses the invisible sources of suffering as well as the visible. This healing symbolism persists today in the use of peony imagery and peony-derived compounds in traditional Chinese medicine, where the root (bai shao and chi shao, white and red peony root) remains an important element of the pharmacopoeia.
The Peony in Western Art and Literature
The peony arrived in Western art and literature with considerable force from the sixteenth century onward, as increased trade with China brought knowledge of the flower’s extraordinary variety and its central place in Chinese culture.
In European flower painting, the peony appears from the seventeenth century in the great Dutch and Flemish floral still lifes, where its enormous blooms serve as anchors for compositions of extreme abundance. Alongside the tulip and the rose, the peony in these paintings participates in the familiar symbolic programme of beauty and transience: it is shown at the peak of its perfection, with petals beginning to drop, the implied arc of decline already under way. The peony in a Dutch still life is the most sumptuous possible argument that beauty is brief.
In English literature, the peony has been associated from the eighteenth century onward with the pleasures of the established, well-kept garden — with a certain kind of settled, prosperous, English domestic life in which the garden is both practical and symbolic, both productive and beautiful. The peony in an English cottage garden is a flower of inheritance: it persists for decades in the same spot, growing larger and more floriferous each year, outlasting the people who planted it and flowering for their children and grandchildren. This quality of persistence and accumulation gives the English peony a meaning distinct from the Chinese flower of honour or the Roman plant of magic: it is the flower of continuity, of things that last, of the value of what is tended over time.
John Keats, predictably, was drawn to the peony’s excess: its ability to embody the quality he called “negative capability” — the simultaneous awareness of beauty and its transience, the capacity to hold both without reaching anxiously for resolution. The peony is, in Keatsian terms, a flower that demands negative capability of everyone who looks at it. It is so obviously, so flagrantly beautiful, and so obviously, so immediately perishable.
Shame, Shyness, and the Blushing Peony
Not all of the peony’s Western symbolic meanings are as celebratory as its Chinese counterparts. In the Victorian language of flowers, the peony carried a meaning that cut directly against its Chinese associations with honour and feminine beauty: it was a flower of bashfulness, shame, and the blushing acknowledgment of one’s own failings.
The Victorian meaning derived from the peony’s most observable quality as a cut flower: its petals drop almost as soon as it reaches full bloom, scattering in a sudden, embarrassed cascade that leaves the vase bare within hours. This petalfall was read as a gesture of shame — the flower that cannot maintain its own spectacular appearance, that opens wide and then immediately, uncontrollably, loses itself. The blush colours of the most common varieties reinforced the association with blushing, with the face reddened by embarrassment.
To send peonies in the Victorian tradition was thus an ambiguous gesture. They could convey admiration for the recipient’s beauty — but they also carried the implicit message that such beauty was as brief and as fragile as a peony’s bloom, and that both giver and receiver should be aware of this. The peony in the Victorian language of flowers is a compliment with a warning folded into it: I find you beautiful; beauty does not last; you know this as well as I do.
This shadow meaning — the flower of shame and acknowledged fragility — sits in interesting tension with the Chinese tradition of the peony as the highest form of honour. The same visual characteristics — the enormous bloom, the explosive opening, the dramatic petalfall — generate opposite symbolic readings depending on which aspect you choose to emphasise: the fullness or the falling.
The Contemporary Peony: Wedding Flower, Luxury Emblem, and the Short Season
The peony has undergone a dramatic rise in the contemporary Western cut flower market over the past two decades, driven by the same forces that have elevated the ranunculus and the anemone: the growth of seasonal floristry, the influence of social media imagery on floral aesthetics, and a broad cultural shift toward flowers that feel abundant, romantic, and slightly old-fashioned in the best possible sense.
In the contemporary wedding industry, the peony is one of the most sought-after flowers in existence. Its associations with romance, abundance, good fortune, and feminine beauty — its Chinese meanings, essentially, translated into a Western aesthetic context — make it almost perfectly suited to the symbolic requirements of a wedding. It is large enough to be dramatic, soft enough to be romantic, fragrant enough to be memorable, and available in a colour range broad enough to suit almost any palette.
The peony’s strict seasonality — it is available in its full, lush, garden-grown glory for only a few weeks in late May and June in the UK, slightly later in northern Europe and the northern United States — gives it a precious quality that year-round availability could never confer. The peony season is awaited, celebrated, and mourned when it passes. In this it resembles the cherry blossom of Japanese tradition: a flower whose beauty is inseparable from its brevity, that you appreciate more fiercely because you know it is going.
The contemporary peony carries meanings that blend its accumulated symbolic history into something distinctly modern: abundance without apology, feminine power fully expressed, the celebration of beauty that does not pretend to last forever but insists on lasting completely while it is here.
Peony Symbolism at a Glance
Across its long and varied cultural history, the peony has represented:
- Healing and medicine — the divine physician Paeon, two thousand years of medical tradition
- Dangerous knowledge and divine jealousy — the founding myth, the student who surpassed the teacher
- Wealth and prosperity — Chinese mudan, the king of flowers, abundance made visible
- Honour and high status — the imperial flower, the emblem of the court, the highest compliment
- Feminine beauty in full maturity — the Chinese poetic tradition, beauty at its most powerful
- Good fortune in marriage — Chinese wedding tradition, the emblem of the full and abundant life
- Defiance and integrity — the legend of Wu Zetian, the flower that blooms in its own time
- Bravery and the gentling of power — Japanese shishi-botan, the lion tamed by the peony
- Shame, bashfulness, and the blushing fall — Victorian floriography, the petalfall as acknowledgment
- Continuity and inheritance — the English garden peony that outlasts its planters
- Transience at maximum intensity — the Keatsian peony, beauty that knows it is brief and insists anyway
A Final Florist Thought
The peony is the flower that most fully embodies a certain kind of courage — the courage of complete openness. It does not hold anything back. It opens as wide as it can go, displays everything it has, releases its entire scent into the air around it, and then drops its petals without apology. It does not ration its beauty or hedge its abundance or pretend to be less than it is. It is, in this sense, the most honest flower in the world: it gives everything it has, all at once, for as long as it can, and then it is done.
The guides in this series have moved through flowers of extraordinary variety: the hyacinth’s fragrant grief, the anemone’s wind-born drama, the ranunculus’s patient layers, the daisy’s solar constancy, the sunflower’s heliotropic devotion, the hydrangea’s colour-shifting complexity. The peony arrives among them as a flower that somehow contains all of their qualities simultaneously — the healing depth of the hyacinth, the mythological weight of the anemone, the layered revelation of the ranunculus, the solar abundance of the sunflower, the cultural complexity of the hydrangea — and expresses them all at once, in one enormous, ruffled, impossible bloom.
That is the peony’s final symbolic lesson. You do not have to choose which beautiful thing to be. You can be all of them at once, for as long as the season allows. And when the petals fall, they fall with their colour intact, scattered across the table like something that was fully itself right up to the end.
“The peony is the most generous of flowers. It holds nothing back. That is its genius, and that is its grief.” — Vita Sackville-West
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