It is early summer in China again and it is the season when Paeonia lactiflora begins to bloom.
Recently, hundreds of acres of Paeonia lactiflora, in the Lingrui Chinese Herbal Medicine Base in Caowan Village, Xin County, Xinyang City, Henan Province, started to bloom, constituting a distinctive scenery. During the “May Day” holiday, tourists from nearby areas visited Caowan Village to enjoy the spectacular sight of this blooming.
The flowering stage of paeonia lactiflora lasts about half a month. Delightfully fragrant, the colorful flowers are also very ornamental. The roots of paeonia lactiflora are processed into Paeoniae Radix Alba and Radix Paeoniae Rrbra which are famous and valuable in Chinese herbal medicine.
The Lingrui Chinese Herbal Medicine Base is operated by Xinyang Lingrui Ecological Agriculture Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Lingrui Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd., based on Chinese herbal medicine and other special resources in Xin County. It was established to meet the huge demands of the main raw materials used by the business of Lingrui Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd.
The base occupies 350 acers and integrates scientific research, demonstration, and herbal planting as a whole, known in large-scale demonstration park. Currently the main kinds of plants, in the park, include herba belladonna, paeonia lactiflora, salvia miltiorrhizae, rhizoma corydalis, hot pepper, ginger and other varieties.
The base adopts the “company + base + farmers” business model to support and guide poor local households to plant Chinese herbal medicines. With increasing income from traditional Chinese herb planting, governmental assistance, and project dividends, previous poor households have gradually changed from “grain farmers” to “pharmaceutical farmers”. Working in the new industrial chain, they have been gotten rid of poverty and improved their lives tremendously.
