Saunders Family Papers

Arthur Percy Saunders was born in London, Ontario in 1869 into a prominent Canadian family. His father William established the system of experimental farms throughout Canada. He had 4 brothers, all distinguished in their professions and avocations. Also one sister who never married. A.P. obtained his B.A. in Chemistry from the University of Toronto in 1890 and then went on to Johns Hopkins for his PhD in Chemistry, graduating in 1894. During at least one summer (1892), he worked for his father doing crosses in wheat. The cross he did led to the Marquis wheat strain selected by his brother Charles who became the first Dominion Cerealist. (Charles also did Chemistry at Toronto and Johns Hopkins but originally pursued a career in music, only turning to breeding of cereals when he couldn't make a living in music. Marquis Wheat was high quality and ripened early enough to be grown in the northern US and the prairie provinces of Canada. Charles was knighted by the British and honored by the French for the contributions of grain to the allies of WWI.)

The family were all interested in ornithology, entomology, music, theatre, art, etc. A.P. played the violin all his life and founded the Chamber Music Society of Ithaca after his retirement from Hamilton College.

After his PhD, A.P. had several one year positions - a year teaching at U W Madison, two years of presumably research at two different German universities, a year at McGill in Montreal, and finally in 1899-1900, a year at Cornell. There he met Louise Brownell who was the Dean of Sage College (Women's College) and who had a doctorate in literature. She had done her undergraduate degree at Bryn Mawr and was great friends with Olivia Clemens, Samuel Clemens' daughter (who died young). Her letters to Louise are housed in the Saunders Family Papers.

A.P. and Louise married and moved to Clinton in fall 1900. At first they lived in part of a house on campus, sharing it with the widow of another faculty member. In 1903 they moved into the Williams Farmhouse, now known as the Saunders House, on Griffin Road. He was Dean from 1909 to around 1929 and continued to teach until 1939. He grew many types of plants - roses, irises, colchiums, etc. but settled on specializing in peonies because they grew well.

As soon as he moved into the Saunders House, he filled the yard with plants. He did some iris breeding and grew the common Chinese peony (then known as Paeonia albiflora or P. sinensis - both names appear in his records, now known as P. lactiflora). He had his own seedlings and named about half a dozen. He also got seeds of Japanese tree peonies and grew those up, naming only one, Noelle de Mosa. He acquired a few European Paeonia species as well such as tenuifolia (the fern leaf peony), mlokosewitschi, and officinalis and began to make crosses between those and the lactiflora varieties. He also acquired some of the newly discovered (1886) woody species, P. lutea and P. delavayi, and began crossing those to the tree peonies (known as Moutan peonies or P. suffruticosa - no longer considered a true species). Only a couple of breeders in France had previously made those crosses.

A.P. and Louise had 4 children: Silvia, Olivia, Duncan, and Blake. Duncan finished high school and started college at Hamilton at the young age of 15. In February of 1922, he was living in a dorm and hit his head during some rough housing and died a few days later. The next year, A.P. took a sabbatical in Europe to get away with his remaining family (personal communication, Saunders' relative Lucy Saunders). While in Europe he visited many botanical gardens and nurseries and upon his return, he ordered many plants and seeds from nurseries and botanical gardens in Europe. He eventually acquired all the known species of peonies.

He attempted to make every possible cross, some of which have never been repeated. He numbered every peony (species, his own plants, and those of others) with 17,224 at the time of his death. He named and introduced over 180 herbaceous peonies and 79 woody peonies, all but one a lutea hybrid. Some were later discarded by either A.P. or Silvia with about 140 herbaceous and 70 woody peonies still in existence. Although the F1 plants were generally single and mostly sterile, some F2 plants were obtained and many of these are in the lineage of today's latest introductions.

From the accounts in the Hamilton College Half Century Annalist's letters, he was beloved by his students (and nicknamed "Stink Saunders" for the odious demonstrations in chemistry classes) and their home was opened to students on many occasions. His own notebooks reflect his concerns for students. He attended the college athletic events and helped to establish the Art Department.

Silvia Saunders had a career in photography for House and Garden magazine among others but returned in 1951 to help her parents. A.P. apparently had a stroke in 1945 and after that time, correspondence was handled by Louise and then Silvia and his journals stopped (they had started in 1877 when he was 8 years old). A.P. died in 1953, Louise in 1961, and Silvia in 1994. Silvia kept up the nursery until about 1970. The Saunders House reverted to the College and the strip of land Saunders had purchased along College Hill Road for his nursery was sold to the College for $1.

Both A.P. and Silvia were very active in the American Peony Society including terms as President. A.P. was also active in the Chamber Music Society of Utica and there are a lot of documents related to that. There are journal notes about theater excursions and Robert Frost was a guest (signed the guestbook in the archives).

Saunders doesn't appear to have published any research articles on chemistry after he went to Hamilton but he collaborated with Dr. Stebbins, then at Colgate University and later at Berkeley, to do cytogenetics of peonies, establishing that some species are diploid, some are tetraploid, and some have both diploid and tetraploid members. They also observed the aberrant pairing of chromosomes in some of the hybrid peonies, especially the lutea hybrid peonies, indicating that although they had the same number of chromosomes, the arrangements of the genes on the chromosomes were not the same. (Chromosome inversions, deletions, duplications, and translocations contribute to speciation.) They published in Genetics in 1938.

Saunders is considered the "father of the modern peony". The only major group of peonies he did not succeed in hybridizing is the intersectional or Itoh group, crosses between woody and herbaceous peonies. Although these are still difficult crosses to make, almost all successes have been achieved by pollinating a P. lactiflora plant by a lutea hybrid. The abnormal chromosome pairing observed years ago by Saunders in the lutea hybrids results in unreduced gametes and the resulting intersectional hybrids are generally triploid with two sets of woody peony chromosomes and one set of P. lactiflora chromosomes.

Source: Lois Girton email to Jeremy Katz (Oct. 4, 2022)