Wine & Peonies to celebrate New Zealand connection

Jan Hanscom and Curtis Thorgaard show their wares during last year's wine and peonies
event. Photo by Joy Morrison

 The Georgeson Botanical Garden will host its annual Wine and Peonies gala on Friday, July 20.

The event will run from 5-7 p.m. at the University of Alaska Fairbanks botanical garden and will celebrate Alaska's peony connections with New Zealand. The fundraiser will feature peonies, New Zealand wine and music. Each participant will receive wine, hors d’oeuvres and a bouquet of fresh-cut peonies.

UAF horticulturist Pat Holloway said a couple from New Zealand, who happened to visit the garden in 2004, encouraged her to help develop a peony industry in Alaska. She had already started variety trials at the garden three years earlier.

"They were the ones who told me we were sitting on a gold mine," she said.

Peonies bloom in the July sun.

The couple, Tony and Judy Banks, were peony growers,  and they offered to host any Alaskan who wanted to come to New Zealand and learn more about how to grow peonies. Jan Hanscom, a peony grower who worked with Holloway at the experiment farm, and several other peony growers took the Banks up on their offer in 2008.  Hanscom came back and presented her findings to other growers at an Alaska Peony Growers conference.

Holloway said, "That connection would never have happened if the research trial plots were not a public botanical garden. It was sheer luck that Tony and Judy just happened to like plants and toured the garden on their vacation. It was even more lucky that I worked on Saturday when they wandered through. Sheer happenstances!"

There are more than 130 peony growers in Alaska now. Peony growers harvested more than 200,000 stems in 2016 at $5 or more a stem. Cut flowers are exported all over the Lower 48 and to Taiwan, China and Vietnam.

Jan Hanscom with peonies in the garden.

During the wine and peonies event, Holloway will give a garden tour. Posters and limited-edition giclee prints of a painting by Fairbanks artist Karen Stomberg, “Green-up Day,” will also be for sale. The Georgeson Botanical Garden Society organized the fundraiser to support operations of the garden.

Tickets are $35 when purchased by July 13 at www.georgesonbotanicalgarden.org or $45 when purchased after July 13 and at the door.  Attendees must be 21 or older unless accompanied by parent, legal guardian or adult spouse.

The garden is located at the Fairbanks Experiment Farm, 117 West Tanana Drive. For more information, contact the Georgeson Botanical Garden Society at 907-474-7222 or at gbgsociety@gmail.com.