Botany Photo of the Day

A special thank you to those who commented on yesterday's photograph. I appreciate the gist of what you've expressed, and I'll not forget or ignore it. I'm keeping my word re: today's photograph though, as I could use a bit of colour myself. We're likely to have the coldest temperature we've had in a long while in Vancouver in the next couple days, so it's particularly delicious (and escapist) to revisit summertime now. Today's photograph was taken half a revolution ago.

Paeonia peregrina seems to have a few English common names. Balkan peony is a reference to its distributional range in southeastern Europe and Turkey. Dr. Allan Armitage calls it “poison peony” in his set of horticultural stock images, but that name doesn't appear elsewhere online. Personally, I'd opt to use a translation of the epithet peregrina to create the common name, which doesn't seem to have been done in English. This seems to have been the practice in French, though: pivoine étrangère, or strange peony. Such a common name would demand an explanation of why this particular species was considered strange or foreign to botanists of the time. Unfortunately, I don't have an answer today, but I'll check some reference works tomorrow to see if I can figure it out.

Photographs of the foliage and fully open flowers are available from both the Pacific Bulb Society and Floral Images.

Lastly, a head's up. I've decided to take a “vacation” from BPotD between December 16 and January 14. Although there will still be a daily photograph, two things will be different: 1) the photographs will be a series of abstracts and 2) I am going to post without scientific comment (the vacation part). Many of the abstracts have literal counterparts previously featured on BPotD, so I will reference those if available. If you're not a fan of abstracts, I hope you'll be able to be patient until mid-January.