Tree peony (Paeonia suffruticosa Andrew) is a popular ornamental plant due to its large, fragrant and colorful flowers. The floral development is the most important event in its lifecycle. To explore the mechanism that regulate flower development, we sequenced the flower bud transcriptomes of ‘High Noon’, a reblooming cultivar of P. suffruticosa × P. lutea, using both full-length isoform-sequencing (ISO-seq) and RNA-seq were sequenced. A total of 15.94 Gb raw data were generated in full-length transcriptome sequencing of the 3 floral developmental stages, resulting 0.11 M protein-coding transcripts. Over 457.0 million reads were obtained by RNA-seq in the 3 floral buds. Here, we openly released the full-length transcriptome database of ‘High Noon’ and RNA-seq database of floral development. These databases can provide a fundamental genetic information of tree peony to investigate its transcript structure, variants and evolution. Data will facilitate to deep analyses of the transcriptome for flower development.

The construction of the ecological environment in rural settlements is a very important part of the development of human settlements. Key to this construction is the coordinated and sustainable development of plant environment, geographical environment, and human activities. Therefore, it is necessary to study the characteristics of plant diversity and their driving mechanisms. The study area, ‘Shanchuan Town’, is located in the hilly area of Southeast China, Anji County, Zhejiang Province. As bamboo forests cover 62% of the total forests, it has the reputation of being the “China town of bamboo”. To interpret rural plant community features, we extracted topography data by the field survey, satellite image, and Digital Elevation Model (DEM) based on ArcGIS platform, then used Spearman’s correlation and a redundancy analysis to examine the relationships between explanatory variables (e.g., plot elevation, slope aspect and architectural height, etc.) and the distribution of plant community diversity. In this study, 227 plots were selected from 14 settlements to investigate totally 105, 88, 206, and 17 species of trees, shrubs, herbs, and vines, respectively, belonging to 147 families, 324 genera, and 416 species. Among them, there were 19 bamboo species, and 47 species of alien plants, which accounted for 11.3% of the total. The dominant trees and shrubs were mainly native species with high edible or ornamental value. The dominant bamboo species were common species for bamboo shoots in Zhejiang Province, while most of the dominant herbaceous species were alien species. Among the explanatory variables, the impact of plot elevation (PE) on plant community was significantly higher than those of other explanatory factors. The correlation analysis showed that the richness and diversity indices of different plant life layers were significantly related to PE. Among the architectural factors, the architectural orientation (AO) and layout type (AT) effect on shrubs and other herbaceous species was stronger than those on trees and bamboo. There was a high plant community richness in the study area, and both topography and architectural factors had a significant effect on plant community. Therefore, construction of the plant landscape should conform to the topography and regulate the residential construction activities properly, so as to get rid of urban planning thinking and the excessive pursuit of plant diversity, realizing the sustainable development of ecological environment in settlements.

Paeonia × lemoinei 'High Noon' is one of the most important cultivars in tree peony (Paeonia sect. Moutan), a traditional horticultural plant in China, with a re-blooming characteristic which was quite different from other cultivars. So, the genetic resources in 'High Noon' were incredibly valuable in flowering-time-modified molecular breeding in tree peony. However, the molecular mechanism underlying the floral bud formation of 'High Noon' was not clear yet. To explore the molecular mechanism in this process, the transcriptomes of three stages during floral bud development were deeply analyzed in this study. As a result, a total of 5816 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were identified between the three developmental stages, and pathways including ''DNA replication'', ''metabolic pathways'', ''circadian rhythm'', and ''plant hormone signal transduction'' were mostly enriched in the functional enrichment and expression pattern analysis. Furthermore, a total of 584 genes related to the photoperiod pathway were further identified and a novel CO homolog gene PlCO was identified to be a stable hydrophilic protein, which contained both CCT domain and B-box domain. Over-expression of PlCO in Arabidopsis resulted in early flowering, which suggested a promotion role of flowering. The PlCO protein localized in nucleus and possessed a transcription activity ability, which implied that PlCO might function as a transcription factor. The transcriptome analysis revealed pathways involved in floral bud development in tree peony and provided new insight into the regulatory network underlying the floral bud development. The gene identification in 'High Noon' provided new valuable candidate genes for flowering-time-modified molecular breeding in tree peony.