The Garden Built in 1982

Caozhou Peony Garden was laid out in 1982 on 1,200 mu of ground, and it is described as the largest peony garden in the world. Within Heze it is the largest of the peony gardens and the one with the most varieties, a strong claim in a city that grows more peonies than anywhere else in China. Its name keeps Caozhou, the word the city carried until 1735, when the Yongzheng reign raised Caozhou to a prefecture and set a county beside it under the new name of Heze. The garden is therefore a piece of the old name kept in the landscape: visitors walk into Caozhou when they walk through the gate.

The garden is the setting for the Heze International Peony Fair, held once a year when the flowers open. The timing is not a matter of choice: a peony bloom lasts seven to ten days, so the fair is a narrow window that moves with the weather, and the city's spring calendar is built around it. Visitors come for varieties that growers have kept and crossed for generations, and the research stations behind the gardens are funded by the state, which is why the collection is both a show and a working library of plants. Outside the season the garden is a park; in the season it is the reason people come to Heze.

Eating the flower is part of the season. The city's peony cake is dated by legend to a flower festival at which Wu Zetian, the future empress, led a maid into a garden and had quantities of blossoms in many colours picked. Back at the palace, so the story goes, she had them mashed with rice and steamed into a cake she called the hundred-flower cake, and she gave it to officials as a gift. The cake is still made here, and the idea survives: petals in the filling, and a sweet that only makes sense in the weeks when the fields are in flower. It is the one part of the peony economy that can be eaten.