As you can tell from my logo, I love poppy flowers. I have various types of poppy in my garden: the oriental poppy (papaver orientale), the breadseed or opium poppy (papaver somniferoum), the arctic poppy (papaver nudicaule mongolia), the californian poppy (eschscholzia californica), the annual poppy (papaver rhoeas), the tree poppy (romneya). I let them seed themselves around the place. I wasn’t planning on having any poppies in the front garden as I wanted to have a woodland theme which I don’t think the poppies fit into. However, they have introduced themselves, so I guess they are there to stay.
I love watching the bees going berserk in the flower cups of the oriental and breadseed poppies.
The oriental poppy is one of those herbaceous perennials that you can cut back to ground level when it has finished flowering (they can look a mess if you don’t and it creates space for other plants to grow into) and, if you are lucky you may get a second flush of flowers later in the year. I’ve even had one flower on Christmas Day a few years ago.
I had a tree poppy in my previous garden which was extremely happy and grew into a large shrub. I have two of them in different parts of this garden, one at the edge of the hot border and one in the main border, but neither of them grow that big and they haven’t flowered as yet which is disappointing.
I have tried growing the himalayan poppy (meconopsis) a couple of times in the past but with no success so I obviously don’t have the right conditions for them.
Whilst writing this blog I’ve realised that I don’t have any iceland poppies (papaver nudicaule) so I’ll have to add that to the list of plants to purchase for next year!
