‘High Noon’ won the Gold Medal given by the American Peony Society in 1989. It is probably the best known and most available Saunders woody peony. In fact, you may get a ‘High Noon’ if you buy a woody peony from a non-specialty nursery! About one-third of the woodies I’ve purchased from retailers turned out to be ‘High Noon’ instead of what they were labeled. Several were also plagued by overgrowth of the herbaceous rootstock. You get what you pay for!! So buy ‘High Noon’ from a reputable specialty nursery instead of at a big box store.
‘High Noon’ has a tendency to put on new growth in late summer and to re-bloom in fall. Scientists in China have studied differences in gene expression between ‘High Noon’ and non-rebloomers to identify genes controlling floral organ development (Wang et al. BMC Genomics (2019) 20:572; https://doi.org/10.1186/s12864-019-5857-0 ).
