In late March and early April 2018, my friend John and I went to Turkey to find interesting flora and bulbs, hopefully in springtime bloom. We went to the south-central coastal region of Antalya, where steep and rugged limestone mountains plunge thousands of feet from their summits into the Mediterranean Sea in a matter of mere miles.

It was exciting to find populations of these peonies scattered throughout the alpine forests of Lebanon cedars (Cedrus libani, which are worth their own blog post!) and other coniferous trees within easy sight of the Mediterranean Sea in Antalya Province.

Turkey is a diverse country with the largest number of plant species in the entire Mediterranean Basin, which is itself known to be a hotspot of biological diversity, as are all similarly Mediterranean climates around the world. Some 10,800 different vascular plant species are known from the Turkish Peninsula, and of those about 31% are endemic, found nowhere else.

Among the 10,800 vascular plant species in Turkey, about 7 or 8 of them are peonies.

I’ve spent some time trying to uncover which species precisely this may be, and it could either be the fairly widespread Paeonia mascula, which ranges from Spain to Israel, or the much more restricted but similar Paeonia kesrouanensis, which is limited to parts of Turkey, Lebanon, and Syria. Both species are threatened by illegal trade in wild-dug plants for the horticulture industry.

Paeonia mascula/P. kesrouanensis opening its first flowers amidst groves of ancient large Cedrus libani trees and other coniferous species.

Finding these plants was a surprise to us, since with our focus on bulbs and orchids we hadn’t really thought about the possibility of also coming across peonies. These were found growing near the timberline of the Taurus Mountains, which flank the Mediterranean Sea both east and west of the large city of Antalya.

A gigantic centuries-old Lebanon cedar with a trunk over 1.5 meters thick (nearly 5 feet) dwarfs a peony in the Taurus Mountains.

The red-tinted foliage is attractive on full-sun plants. Ones in more shaded spots are a more typical green color.

Floral detail of the Turkish peonies we found, either Paeonia mascula or P. kesrouanensis.

Peonies have such brilliant flowers – it is too bad that they don’t last for longer, opening and fading within a week. To catch them in prime bloom was fortuitous, since a week sooner or later and we’d have missed the main showing. That was another surprise, because bloom times can vary by several weeks based upon the previous winter’s temperatures and precipitation, and timing a visit to find them in flower is hard to pinpoint with great accuracy. If you happen to live locally, this would not be tremendously difficult, but we don’t – we live in the United States and had to preplan our trip several months in advance. So it was just sheer luck that we caught them in pristine shape, even if we had known we’d be finding them at all….

Peonies are considered to be among the oldest of plants in terms of floral structure, evolutionarily speaking. Whichever plants that first evolved to become blooming angiosperms, the flowers probably resembled peonies pretty closely, at least from the standpoint of how the flower parts are arranged.

A caterpillar, likely from a moth of some sort, hides in and perhaps also feeds upon the petals of this peony.

Peony flowers usually have several pistils and ovaries, ranging in number from one to five, with three being a common number like in this case. They develop into pointed and velvety seed capsules between one and two inches long.

As referenced above, peony flowers don’t last very long, going from bud to unfurled to petal drop in only 3 to 5 days at most, although the progression may be delayed slightly by cool or wet weather. Once fertilized the pistils enlarge into the seed capsules fairly quickly.

Peony habitat as we found it in Turkey’s Taurus Mountains. The tall background tree and most of the smaller juveniles around it are Lebanon cedars, and the short tree with the cartoonishly thick trunk in the foreground appears to be another cedar or juniper species, but I don’t know which at this point.

This photo was snapped near the forest’s timberline, which for some reason seems pretty low here at not much more than 6000 feet (1750 meters) in elevation despite it being a mid-latitude coastal climate as opposed to some frigid Arctic one. Treeline is often found a thousand meters higher in other climates at similar latitudes in interior North America, so it made me wonder why it was so low in Turkey, only a few miles from the moderating influences of the coastal waters.

My hypothesis is that it might not be related so much to winter cold as it is to summer dryness, since the long nearly rainless Mediterranean summers can get quite warm. My guess is that this is probably what inhibits tree survival much above this level, especially in thin, rocky soils exposed to dry air, wind, and intense sun. Grazing animals might also play a role in keeping seedling trees cleared from colonizing alpine meadows, as this landscape has been used and modified by humans and their livestock for many thousands of years.

Peonies grow as isolated individuals or in small colonies of 3 to 10 plants. At least that was the only way we found them in two days of exploring the botany of these mountains. Large blocks of eroded limestone are the main substrate of the Taurus Mountains near Antalya.

On shaded patches of forest floor, there was still significant snow remaining to be melted when these pics were taken on April 4, 2018. The snow accumulated in bowl-shaped depressions, no doubt some of it blown in by strong winter winds from treeless areas only a hundred meters away. The north faces of the mountains also retained significant snow, but it was mostly gone on south, east, and west faces due to the increasingly warm sun of springtime.

The emerging foliage of Paeonia mascula/kesrouanensis is colorful too, with pinkish-red basal bracts erupting in waxy purplish leaves which unfurl to become greener as they age. Old, dry stems from previous years of growth lie scattered radially around the crown from which the new growth is appearing.

A bit of sunshine highlights the basal stems and bracts of newly-emerging peony foliage through the leaf litter. This plant was not far from a retreating snowbank on a shady north slope similar to the one shown above. I’d imagine that this color is a welcome sign of spring to anyone who grows this species!

Peonies in mostly full sun on south or west-facing slopes are a week or two ahead of their shaded and north-slope neighbors nearby. This small aggregation has opened its first flowers, with others likely to follow suit within a few more days. The shaded ones will be around 2 weeks behind due to cooler conditions and a later start.

These peonies are growing upon limestone, which is by far the most dominant stone type in the Antalya Region. I don’t know whether they do best on limestone as some plants of the region do, or whether they adapt easily to different substrates, since we never really left limestone zones in the 10 days we were in Turkey.

Lebanon cedars tower over several peonies on a limey ridge in Turkey’s Taurus Mountains.

I find these limestone-bouldered slopes a rather improbable-looking habitat for such delicate, showy plants. But I understand that this notion is also clearly influenced by my only prior experience of peonies as being garden plants, domesticated in perennial borders in Colorado where I grew up. Never having seen wild peonies before, I just wasn’t expecting to see them here, and I was delighted to see their native situation.

An understory of ferns and perennial wildflowers joins the peonies on the thick, stratified limestone beds that underpin these rugged mountains. I may be foremost a desert lover at heart, but I appreciate every natural ecosystem on its own merits.

Dense gray lichens cover fallen twigs as a handful of other wildflowers join the peony show in early April underneath the cedars.

What a pleasing woodland scene!

John with our rental car and peony plants on a sunny road cut in the cedar forest.

The peonies we found were a definite highlight of the botany trip we took, but they were far from the only features of interest. We saw many bulbs, conifers, orchids, and other flowers, not to mention ancient Greek ruins, and a long rich cultural and archaeological history ranging from pre-Roman to modern Islamic. Turkey is one of the world’s top ten most touristed countries as ranked by foreign admissions, and deservedly so. It’s a wonderful place. I intend to return again someday and see if I can’t uncover some of Turkey’s other peony species and botanical treasures.   🙂