Topdecker said:
I am pretty sure that overseas growers are concerned with the price of shipping more than US growers. As a result, they grow peonies specifically for sale overseas (1 year or 2 year plants) which then have the bulk of their roots removed and they are also dried quite a bit in order to remove some water weight. What they do send has a fairly uniform size / weight and is viable, but the resulting plants are generally going to be a year or perhaps two years behind starts from US growers (that have significantly more fresh plant matter).
IMO, the dahlias that they send as clumps are much larger than the peonies that they sell. That really has me scratching my head - but the dahlia clumps are often times close to double the price of a peony.
Top
I've had the luck of getting a glimpse into the Dutch bulb/rhizome production system. I cannot say everything I was told so I need to be a bit vague nor was I allowed to take any pictures but I can tell this much: it's one of the most mind-bogging industries (yes, industry) I've seen in my life.
Dutch growers produce exactly the same "roots" (let's use this term) whether they are going to be shipped to Italy or Canada due to economy of scales. As you rightly suspected the plants are genetically screened to ensure they are all the same caliber when one year old and all batches have the same survival rate once planted. Mutants are monitored to see if they have desirable traits or if they should be culled and mutation rates are kept strictly under control, albeit with the present clonal reproduction tecniques the mutation rate is in the 0.001% range for most commercial varieties.
Commercially grown Dutch peonies are tiny: they are usually one year plants that will take 3-4 years to bloom. This due to the fact that peonies are not container-grown as most small and medium sized nurseries do, but are grown in the open, pulled out from the ground at the end of the season, processed, packaged and shipped all over the world. This is done because most agri land in The Netherlands has been in intense cultivation for so long nematodes and other ground-dwelling pathogens are an ever-present threat even with fumigation.
Chinese commercial growers have been trying to get a slice of the pie by taking on their Dutch competitors, but so far results have been mixed.
The great strengths of Chinese growers are two. First, they sell older plants than the Dutch, usually 2-3 year old, and second they have a truly huge selection while the Dutch focus on just a few marketable cultivars. I have a single Chinese-originated peony (Qi Hua Lu Shuang) and apart from the unintelligible "English" on the growing instructions it has long been an excellent plant and first bloomed one year after being planted.
But problems are many. First is Chinese growers struggle to obtain the USDA and/or EU certifications needed to export their products here: selling single roots on eBay or Alibaba "under the table" is not quite the same as selling whole containers full of roots like the Dutch do. Second is that, yep, scams abound, chiefly driven by how difficult it is for, say, a French import company to sue a Chinese commercial grower in China.
