Quadrille Fabric: Tree Peony - Custom Multi Blues on Tinted Belgian Linen / Cotton

The tree peony — mùdān, 牡丹 — is not the peony in your mother’s garden. That one is herbaceous, dies to the ground each October, and returns in June as if nothing happened. The tree peony is a woody shrub, cultivated in China for 1,500 years, and at the Tang court in Luoyang the varieties were counted the way Bordeaux counts estates. Empress Wu Zetian, legend has it, banished the tree peonies to Luoyang when they refused to bloom on her winter command. The story is probably apocryphal. The flower’s standing at the top of the Chinese botanical hierarchy is not.

Here it is translated onto Belgian linen/cotton in Custom Multi Blues — screen-printed by hand on a ground tinted just enough to warm the whites. Open blooms in several blues, leaves in three, branches that twine rather than sprawl, small incidents in the negative space you catch on second viewing.

Ten yards left. Enough for a wing chair and a pillow, a pair of narrow curtains, a canopy above a bed — a short and very good decision. When these yards go the pattern goes with them.

All quantities given in yards.

At time of listing this fabric was in two pieces, both from the same dyelot.  Please measure before ordering to make sure these cuts will work for your project.

OW  J55237 A          2.0
OW  J55237 C          8.0

Please note that colors may not represent accurately in photo. Additional photo(s) provided to show scale, not colorway. Please contact us before purchase with any questions. ALL SALES ARE FINAL, and we do not send cuttings for approval.