ShawnSteve said:To be more precise there were only four actually original 'Itoh" hybrids, of which all were yellow: ' Yellow Crown", Yellow Emperor, & I think 'Yellow Heaven & another "Itoh 'Yellow , starts with a D... ( sorry, forgot) The others, so-called "ITOH" are likely hybrid descendants resulting from those four original 'Itoh' (intersectional?) hybrids.
Mr. Itoh apparently did not live long enough to see the flowers bloom. I think they were finally registered many years afterward, about 1974 with the American Peony Society,.
Itoh or Intersectional peonies have a huge problem for breeders: they are all triploids, meaning they have three sets of chormosomes, meaning they have such low fertility their seeds are to all purposes steriles. All the Itoh we grow these days are so called first generation or F1 hybrids, meaning they all descend from crossing a Tree peony with a Herbaceous peony and further propagation by clonal methods. Peony genetics started to be well understood only in the late 80's/early 90's, and since it takes almost a decade for any cultivar to go from seedling to the first commercial introduction it explains why the number and quality of Itoh peonies has "exploded" over the past decade.
The Holy Grail of peony breeding would be of course a second generation (F2) hybrid. The chances of an F1 Itoh of giving viable reproductive material are one in six million if I remember correctly. Not exactly encouraging, albeit there have been a number of seedlings produced over the years. At last check Don Smith had two and there's a breeder in Australia (Dr Bernard Chow?) with several more.
Whether these seedlings will turn out to be fit for being introduced on the commercial market and/or further hybridization remains an open question.
Louis Smirnow from Huntington NY bought several of the original Itoh hybrids in Japan from Dr Toichi's widow and the most commercially palatable of these became the first generation of Itoh introduced in 1974. The fourth Yellow is Yellow Dream. He later introduced the first two pink Itoh, Pink Heaven and Pink Symphony, which had originated from sister seedlings, a rare occurence.
Smirnow had a passion for obtaining peonies directly from Japan and later China: some of the cultivars he introduced in the West such as Fan Tan are of unknown parentage either because records had been lost during the war or because they were sold to him as "very ancient", meaning take it or leave it.
