Nichols Arboretum and the Peony Collection

The arboretum tucked into the ravine along the Huron River is one of the quieter landmarks in Ann Arbor, and one of the more unusual ones.

Nichols Arboretum was designed by Ossian Cole Simonds, a landscape architect and University of Michigan alumnus, and opened in nineteen-oh-seven. The site was assembled through a gift of land from Esther Connor Nichols and her husband Walter in nineteen-oh-six, combined with adjacent university property. The city and the university struck an agreement: the university would maintain the garden, the city would build roads and provide policing. The formal name Nichols Arboretum was adopted in nineteen twenty-two.

The arboretum covers one hundred twenty-eight acres, most of it a naturalistic landscape of native Michigan plants set in the ravines and ridges along the river. But tucked into the upper portion is something specific and extraordinary: the largest collection of heirloom peonies in North America.

The collection began in nineteen twenty-two when William E. Upjohn, a University of Michigan medical school alumnus and the founder of the Upjohn pharmaceutical company in Kalamazoo, donated his personal peony collection to the arboretum. Upjohn had amassed two hundred eighty cultivars. Of those, one hundred ninety-six varieties still survive more than a century later. The collection has since grown to approximately three hundred fifty cultivars.

Each spring, in late May and early June, the peony beds bloom in waves of color that draw visitors from across the region. They are not a showpiece grafted onto the arboretum from the outside. They are a century-old living collection, tended across generations, the kind of thing that takes a very long time to make and is very easy to lose. Ann Arbor has kept it.