Important: Safety Warning
This page prescribes plants as medicine according to pre-modern medical theory. Several of the plants named are toxic, correct identification is difficult, and the doses given have no scientific basis. Do not ingest or apply any preparation described here.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Peony
a genus of plants belonging to the natural order Ranunculaceæ, and very generally cultivated in gardens for the sake of their large showy flowers.
The species are mostly herbaceous, having perennial tuberous roots and large deeply-lobed leaves. The flowers are solitary, and of a variety of colors, crimson, purplish, pink, yellow, and white. The flowers, however, have no smell, or not an agreeable one, except in the case of a shrubby species, P. Moutan, a native of China, of which several varieties, with beautiful whitish flowers stained with pink, are cultivated in gardens.
The roots and seeds of all the species are emetic and cathartic in moderate doses.
P. officinalis or festiva, the common peony of cottage gardens, was formerly in great repute as a medicine.