Peony Allan Rogers - Background Story. Find Out All About This WONDERFUL Fragrant Garden Peony 👏😊

Welcome to the YouTube channel of Over the Vest Nurseries. This is where we feature a wide selection of top performing garden plants. Ones that have been especially selected for their performance here in our Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern USA region. If you're a returning subscriber, welcome back. But if you haven't yet subscribed to our channel, I'd like to suggest that you think about doing so. Because we're posting new videos all the time, and many are introducing plants that you're unlikely to find anywhere else. And if you come across any of our videos that appeal to you, it would be great if you could kindly click the like icon, because that will help other people find the information too. Well, I don't know if you've discovered it yet, but elsewhere on this channel, you're likely to find a video that describes this beautiful Peony. It's called Peony Alan Rogers, and in that video we give you the scope on the height, the hardiness, the reliability, and why we're recommending and thinking that it's one that you should look at getting a space somewhere in your garden. But I also wanted to tell you a little bit more. And that is, besides all of its wonderful garden attributes, it has a lovely story behind its background. And that is that this variety was developed in Milwaukee. It was a seedling bred by the late Bill Seidel. Now Bill returned from the military in 1956, a couple of tours in Japan, and he started to think about what he was doing, and because he had been working with his uncle as a small boy, he learned about hybridizing gladiola. So he got interested in breeding gladioli. Then he moved on to work with daylilies. And then in the 1960s, he started to work on peonies. And somewhere around the middle of the 1960s, we think, he developed a seedling that was this one, short, white, compact flowering one with a lovely fragrance. He kept his eye on it, and over a period of time as it grew, he split it into two, and had two plants growing in his gardens. When in the early 90s, a peony expert, Alan Rogers, who was a grower from Portland, Oregon, was writing a book about peonies, so he came to visit his garden. And as he walked around the garden, he spotted these two plants. Well, obviously he loved the fact that it was double flowered, compact, bushy, just everything about it looked like it was a good plant. So later that autumn, Bill very generously dug up one of the plants and sent the divisions to Alan Rogers. It was a good thing that he did, because a couple of years later, Bill's garden got flooded, and the one and only plant that he had perished. Then he kept on working, breeding mainly tree peonies, and thought nothing more about it until 2008, when Pete Widstra from Oregon Perennial Company called him to say that he'd got some plants from Alan, he had them in production, and he wondered if it was OK with Bill if he called this variety after Alan Rogers, the legendary peony expert. Well of course it was fine with Bill, and that today is how we got this wonderful variety. Thanks to the generosity of one man, the knowledge of what was a good plant, and the sharing of it with a nurseryman by another man, and then really the fact that a nurseryman was able to take this and put it into production, and so today we're able to grow this gorgeous peony, tell you about it, and so that you are able to enjoy it too. This is Peony Alan Rogers, a really wonderful, compact growing, and very, very nice little peony. Thank you.